The U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) recently announced the appointment of Mojdeh Bahar as associate director for innovation and industry services (ADIIS). In this capacity, she will report to Under Secretary of Commerce for Standards and Technology and NIST Director Walter G. Copan and serve as a member of the NIST senior leadership team.

Bahar comes to NIST from the Department of Agriculture (USDA) Agricultural Research Service, where she has served as the assistant administrator for technology transfer. In that capacity, she had broad responsibility for managing intellectual property and technology transfer across the USDA. She led the service’s external interactions with industry, academia, and government dealing with intellectual property and technology transfer.

In addition, Bahar previously worked at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as the chief of the Cancer Branch at the Office of Technology Transfer. There, she led a team responsible for marketing, patenting, and licensing NIH and USDA inventions in the areas of cancer, gene therapy, and biological response modifiers. She also served in several leadership roles with the Federal Laboratory Consortium for Technology Transfer, including as its national chair from 2011-2013.

The ADIIS is NIST’s principal executive responsible for partnerships with industry, providing oversight for the key extramural and technology transfer programs of the institute. In this role, Bahar has responsibility for enhancing the successful transfer of new technologies from NIST’s research laboratories to commercial markets and for reporting on behalf of the federal government impacts from the nation’s more than $150 billion federal investment in research. She will also be responsible for coordinating technology transfer policy development and implementation through a network of U.S. federal interagency technology transfer bodies.

For more information, visit www.nist.gov.