Dr. Jill Dahlburg, Superintendent of the Naval Research Laboratory's Space Science Division, has recently been elected as Chair-Elect of the Panel on Public Affairs (POPA) of the American Physical Society (APS). POPA addresses public policy issues that have a technical dimension of interest to physicists. With the APS Physics Policy Committee, POPA oversees the APS Office of Public Affairs, which facilitates communication between physicists, the public, and government on scientific issues of concern to APS members and to the nation as a whole.
By serving as Chair of this technical society panel, Dahlburg says that she, hopes to contribute to the ongoing POPA efforts to better elucidate to decision-makers the set of fundamental conditions that are required for success in the prospecting phase of innovation, which is essential for significant future progress in wide areas of the physical sciences that serve as drivers for progress in our society as a whole.
The recent and future APS POPA Chairs include Arthur Bienenstock, 2004 (Stanford); Frank von Hippel, 2005 (Princeton); Ernest Moniz, 2006 (MIT); Robert Eisenberg, 2007 (retired); Miles Klein, 2008 (UIUC); Duncan Moore, 2009 (U.Rochester); Robert Socolow, 2010 (Princeton); Venkatesh Narayanamurti, 2011 (Harvard); and, Jill Dahlburg, 2012 (NRL).
Dahlburg began her career at NRL in 1985, working as a research physicist. In 2000, she served as head of the Tactical Electronic Warfare's Distributed Sensor Technology Office. From 2001 to mid-2003, Dahlburg left NRL to work for General Atomics as the Director of the Division of Inertial Fusion Technology and co-director of the Theory and Computing Center in the Energy Group. She returned to NRL as the Senior Scientist for Science Applications and then was selected to head the Space Science Division in 2007.
Dahlburg holds a bachelor's degree from Saint John's College in Annapolis, Maryland, a master's in physics and a doctorate in theoretical physics from the College of William and Mary in Virginia. She has also served as a member of the research staff of Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, 1986, and in 1996 she was a Visiting Scientist at Imperial College in London, concurrent with her duties at NRL.