Denise Caldwell

Acting Assistant Director National Science Foundation

Dr. Caldwell is the Acting Assistant Director for the Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorate at the National Science Foundation (NSF). Consisting of the five divisions of astronomy, chemistry, mathematics, materials research, and physics, the Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorate is the largest of the research directorates within the agency. MPS awards fund a broad spectrum of research projects carried out by individual investigators, small teams, and centers and holds responsibility for the ground-based astronomical observatories in the US and other large facilities like the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO), the National High-Field Magnet Laboratory, the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, and the Center for High-Energy X-Ray Science at CHESS. Dr. Caldwell is a graduate of Columbia University with a Ph.D. in physics. Following a postdoctoral position at the University of Bielefeld in Germany, she began her teaching career on the faculty of the Physics Department at Yale University before moving to the University of Central Florida in 1985. In 1995 she moved to the NSF on temporary assignment from the University of Central Florida and became a permanent NSF employee in 1998. She has published over 60 papers in peer-reviewed journals and is a Fellow of the American Physical Society. Between 1995 and 2007 Dr. Caldwell served as Program Director in the Physics Division with responsibility for three programs, Atomic, Molecular, Optical and Plasma Physics (AMOP), Biological Physics (BP), and Physics Frontiers Centers (PFC), the latter two which she created within the Division. In 2007 she was appointed Deputy Division Director of the Physics Division; in 2013, following the conclusion of a nation-wide search, she was appointed Division Director, a role which she exercised for over ten years. In October 2023 she took on her current position of Acting Assistant Director for MPS. Over the years she has participated in, and in some instances led, a number of major cross-disciplinary NSF-wide initiatives, including the Optical Science and Engineering program, the Nanoscale Science and Engineering program, the Information Technology Research program, and Understanding the Brain. Until recently she co-chaired the NSF Quantum Stewardship Steering Committee that is overseeing the NSF investment in Quantum Information Science and Engineering in response to the National Quantum Initiative Act (NQIA). She currently serves as one of the co-chairs of the NSTC Subcommittee on Quantum Information Science called for in the National Quantum Initiative Act.