BIOGRAPHY

Connie Chang Research Director U.S. Department of Commerce / Technology Administration

Profile

Connie Chang currently serves as Research Director in the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Technology Administration (TA) where she is responsible for leading the development of TA’s overall policy agenda and managing the execution of its various projects and activities with a staff of policy analysts, consultants, and external researchers. Prior to her current position she served as the Acting Director for the Office of Technology Policy at TA. She is also an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Georgetown University where she co-teaches a course on the economics of technology, innovation, and growth.

Connie’s interest in the processes, corporate strategies, and funding sources for innovation and policies related to science, technology, innovation were shaped and honed during the ten years she spent at the Advanced Technology Program (ATP), a public-private partnership program focused on developing high-risk, enabling technologies with the potential for broad-based economic impact. ATP is part of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, an agency TA oversees. She was involved in all aspects of the program, ranging from serving as a voting member on several Source Evaluation Boards which assess and recommend qualified R&D projects for ATP funding, to managing the business and economic aspects of dozens of multi-million dollar projects in advanced chemistry and materials processing, to evaluating the impact of funded projects. Most recently, she served as Supervisory Economist to a staff of six professionals assigned to the Policy Research & Analysis group of the Economic Assessment Office.

Drawing in outside experts and research consultants, Connie led major program evaluation studies and policy research reports for ATP to advance the understanding of technology-based innovation, including studies that examined methodologies and established new frameworks for evaluating the impact of R&D projects, and reports that focused on the funding sources and private-sector decision making for investing in early-stage technology development as well as publications to assist entrepreneurs in how to present their story to venture capitalists. All reports can be found on ATP’s website at: <http://www.atp.nist.gov/eao/eao_pubs.htm>. She has also funded research on using cited and citing patents as a forward indicator of emerging technologies, applying GIS (geographic information system) mapping techniques to visualize these effects, and developing an entrepreneur-centered understanding of regional innovative capacity—work that she is advancing in her capacity as Research Director at TA.

Prior to her government career, she worked at Credit Suisse First Boston (CSFB), formerly known as The First Boston Corporation, a premier Wall Street investment banking firm. As a Financial Analyst for the Federal Finance and Mortgage Finance Groups for CSFB, she structured, valued, and analyzed a variety of financing options for Federal agencies, foreign governments, commercial banks, and thrift savings banks.