April 16, 2018

Lisa M. Zurk, New Executive Director of the UW Applied Physics Laboratory

Today, April 16, 2018,  Dr. Lisa Zurk becomes the new executive director of the Applied Physics Laboratory at the University of Washington (APL-UW), the eighth leader of APL-UW and the first women to assume this role. Zurk comes to the UW from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), where she directed allocation of the nation’s research investments. As a program manager in the agency’s Strategic Technology Office, her area of interest was physics-based processing techniques applied to advanced sensor system concepts.

An alumna of the UW, Zurk will be returning as Professor of Electrical Engineering. Her most recent academic position was as Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Portland State University. During her decade-long career at PSU she founded and co-directed the Northwest Electromagnetic and Acoustics Research Laboratory (NEAR-Lab), which is recognized nationally for developing advanced techniques to exploit physics-based wave phenomena.