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Linda Derr (Fed)
Boulder PREP Director
Linda Derr is the Federal Program Officer and Director of the Boulder Professional Research Experience Program (PREP) and the Boulder Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Program. She is responsible for administering the cooperative agreements between the NIST Boulder Laboratories and PREP-participating universities.
Linda was hired at NIST in 1994 as a Group Secretary in the Optoelectronics Division 815 in EEEL and was soon promoted to AO Assistant, and further promoted to Administrative Office for the newly formed Magnetics Division 816. After the EEEL re-organization to PML, she continued as the AO for the RF Technology Division 818 (currently Div 672 in CTL). In 2015, she became the Senior Management Advisor for the newly formed Communications Technology Laboratory (CTL/67) and was then given the Boulder Director’s responsibility of the Professional Research Experience Program (PREP) in 2018.
Linda Derr came to NIST after serving in the United States Army as a 98G Electronic Warfare (EW) Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) Voice Interceptor (Russian) and 98C Signals Intelligence Analyst supporting the Army’s tactical and strategic missions around the world. She worked many assignments during her time in the Army, including four years at the National Security Agency (NSA) at Ft. George G. Meade, MD, participating in the Russian Military Linguist Program while attending the National Cryptologic School, and started a new NSA mission at Field Station Kunia on Oahu, Hawaii, where she oversaw both the Russian voice mission of all four services (Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine), as well as supporting the Morse Interceptor mission.
Over her more than 30 years at NIST, Linda’s favorite thing is to pass her knowledge down to the next generation of admins at NIST. Over the years, along with training her own division admin staff, new AO’s incoming to NIST, and providing ad hoc training to anyone who asked, she developed many other formal training classes, including the ever-popular “ACCS/Object Class Code” training that she presented NIST-wide multiple times over the years. She also developed and made available resource materials on a wide range of administrative functions, including a “Non-Employee Payment Options” guide that was shared with the NIST Researcher Advisory Committee (RAC) and instructions on how to bring on new NIST Intergovernmental Personnel Act (IPA) agreement Associates.
Awards
2022 Colleagues' Choice Award: https://www.nist.gov/nist-awards/2022-colleagues-choice-award-linda-derr
NIST Women Veterans: https://inet.nist.gov/pml/veterans-day-2021-two-nist-female-veterans
NIST Veterans Affinity Group, Boulder Team Lead: https://inet.nist.gov/mando/veterans-affinity-group
NIST New Leader Program, Class 17: https://inet.nist.gov/files/jpg/nlp17grouppicture
NISTIR 5041, A Bibliography of the NIST Optoelectronics Division, 1995, Editor https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/Legacy/IR/nistir5041.pdf