Laura Biven joined the Office of the Deputy Director for Science Programs as Science and Technology Advisor in September 2008. Her responsibilities include advising the Deputy Director on science program management and policy issues, and providing coordination and analysis of budget, scientific, technical, programmatic, and operational issues regarding the SC Program Offices and national laboratories. Laura also currently serves as a primary liaison to the Offices of Advanced Scientific Computing Research and High Energy Physics.
From 2005 to 2008 she was AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellow, serving first as Commodity Import Analyst at the US Department of Agriculture and then as Science and Technology Analyst at the US Department of State. She has also served as member of the mathematics faculty at Bard High School Early College in New York City; postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Complex Physics in Dresden, Germany; and visiting scientist to the Abdus Salam International Center for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy. She received a first class M.Sc. degree in Mathematics and Physics from the University of Bristol and a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from the University of Warwick, both in the UK.
Laura has received a number of awards for teaching and the public dissemination of science including three AAAS/Subaru Lesson Writing contests and first prize in an essay competition organized by the International Congress on Mathematical Physics 2000 for the essay: “Weak-Wave Turbulence: A Tragic Super-hero of Turbulence Theory.”