Senior Policy Advisor

Clara Asmail serves as Senior Policy Advisor at the Office of Technology Transitions. She is responsible for all data collection, analysis and interactions with the National Laboratory Tech Transfer Working Group. She joined the Department of Energy in late 2016 after 28 years at the National Institute of Standards and Technology where she developed new approaches to support R&D and manufacturing businesses with resources to commercialize technologies; managed the SBIR Program and Technology Transfer; and led optical scatterometry R&D projects.

At the Office of Technology Transitions (OTT), she provides technological and policy guidance for procedures, techniques, and tools to manage DOE information including licensing and technology transfer opportunities, portfolio and systems analysis, shared use and user facility access, and Open Data initiatives. She promotes DOE information exchange/accessibility through the Internet and external meetings, ensuring DOE’s opportunities and efforts are appropriately promoted and made transparent to internal and external audiences.

As Senior Technical Advisor for NIST’s Manufacturing Extension Partnership, she developed partnerships with federal, state, and private programs, as well as universities and community colleges to bring right-fit technology-based resources to manufacturers. She fostered connections among small and medium sized manufacturers (SMMs) with the DOE National Laboratories by promoting the Small Business Voucher program, Lab Corps, and MITEC. She led the additive manufacturing community of practice for the MEP network of Centers by engaging experts in AM technologies and applications. She also led the MEP Access to Capital initiative by developing information kits for national and regional partnerships to facilitate MEP Center engagements with SMEs involving financial needs to support planning for technology-based growth.

As NIST Technologies Liaison and SBIR Program Manager, Ms. Asmail developed marketing initiatives aimed toward commercialization of technologies developed at the NIST Labs and managed the NIST SBIR Program and leveraged it to meet NIST mission-related R&D needs and to transfer NIST technologies to small businesses. She conducted 50+ commercialization assessments of NIST invention disclosures and negotiated dozens of CRADAs and license agreements.

The first dozen years of her career were happily spent in the lab building instrumentation and methodologies to measure angularly-resolved light scatter from surfaces such as super smooth mirrors and semiconductor wafers. She has published 20+ papers and co-invented a method to resolve scattering derived from particulate/microroughness/subsurface defect sources. That patent license earns the historical highest royalty revenue to NIST.