Louise R. Howe is a program director in the Office of Emerging Frontiers and Multidisciplinary Activities (EFMA) at the National Science Foundation (NSF), Directorate for Engineering (ENG), and is the program director for the Engineering Research Visioning Alliance award. She is also the program officer for the Germination program, which focuses on exploratory pedagogical platforms, frameworks, and/or learning environments to increase academic researchers’ ability to formulate research questions with substantive potential for societal impact. Additionally, she leads the selection process for new topics for the Emerging Frontiers in Research and Innovation (EFRI) Program.
Howe earned her bachelor’s, master’s, and doctorate degrees in natural sciences/biochemistry from the University of Cambridge and undertook postdoctoral fellowships at the Institute of Cancer Research in London and at the University of California, San Francisco, before moving to Weill Cornell Medical College (WCMC) in 1996, where her research focused on breast cancer, and particularly the relationship between obesity, inflammation and cancer risk. From 2014 to 2016, she undertook a sabbatical at NSF/ENG as a AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellow. She retired from WCMC in December 2018, enabling her to focus full time at NSF on approaches for academic researchers to achieve societal impact through their scientific research.