Dr. Carol R. Lewis is the NASA SBIR Science Mission Directorate (SMD) Liaison. She manages and administers NASA’s SBIR program for SMD, on behalf of the Mission Directorate Representatives (MDRs) at NASA HQ. This includes supporting the MDRs in timely and coordinated SBIR solicitation and portfolio activities, and in providing program oversight guidance which reflects NASA Science technology needs and priorities. Prior to November 2018 she was the SBIR/STTR Center Technology Transition Lead for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which included planning, development, and implementation of activities to assure that the program produced technologies that support JPL and NASA missions, and collaborating toward their commercialization by industry.
Prior to joining the SBIR/STTR Program, Dr. Lewis served as a technical line manager for spacecraft power systems and technologies, and optical and chemical sensors. Her organizations supported numerous planetary and earth orbiting flight projects with hardware design, development and testing of spacecraft power subsystems and lasers/optical metrology subsystems. They also conducted cutting edge technology development on photovoltaic arrays, thermal to electric power conversion, solid state electrochemistry, advanced bulk and thin film batteries, direct methanol fuel cells, optical metrology sources, and array-based chemical sensing. As Instrument Manager for JPL's Electronic Nose (ENose), she led the delivery of this array-based sensing technology demonstration, bridging the TRL 4-to-6 transition; a year later, ENose completed its successful six-month flight experiment onboard the International Space Station. Before joining JPL, Dr. Lewis supervised the materials research and development group at the Varian Research Center (Palo Alto, CA) that was responsible for numerous record-breaking efficiencies for single-junction and multijunction single-crystal semiconductor solar cells.
Dr. Lewis received a Ph.D. degree in Inorganic Chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a B. S. degree in Chemistry from Yale University.