John Sarrao is the Deputy Laboratory Director for Science, Technology and Engineering (DDSTE) at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He leads the Laboratory’s mission and enabling science, technology, and engineering capabilities. DDSTE spans the Laboratory’s directorates for Chemistry, Earth & Life Sciences; Global Security; Physical Sciences; and Simulation and Computation. John also has programmatic responsibility for LANL’s global security (non-proliferation, counter-proliferation, emerging threats), DOE-Office of Science, and applied energy programs. John stewards LANL’s Laboratory Directed Research & Development (LDRD) program and other institutional capability initiatives, including the Laboratory’s student and post-doc programs. He also serves as LANL’s Chief Research Officer.   

From 2013 to 2018, John served as LANL’s Associate Director for Theory, Simulation, and Computation (AD-TSC). John also played a national leadership role in the Exascale Computing Project. Previously, Sarrao was the Program Director for Los Alamos’s Office of Science Programs, and for MaRIE (Matter-Radiation Interactions in Extremes), LANL’s signature facility concept which will provide transformational materials solutions for national security challenges. John has held a number of leadership positions within LANL’s materials community, including Division Leader of the Materials Physics and Applications Division and Group Leader of Condensed Matter and Thermal Physics.  John has also served on a number of U.S. Department of Energy Basic Energy Sciences Advisory Committee (BESAC) Subcommittees, helping to set strategic directions for materials research.

John’s primary research interest is in the synthesis and characterization of correlated electron systems, especially actinide materials.  He was the 2013 winner of the Department of Energy’s E.O. Lawrence Award and the 2004 winner of the LANL Fellows Prize for Research, in part for his discovery of the first plutonium superconductor. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the American Physical Society (APS), and Los Alamos National Laboratory.