Sharon L. Hays, Ph.D.

Dr. Sharon Hays was appointed Chief of Staff of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) on July 10, 2005. Prior to that, she served as OSTP’s Deputy Associate Director for Technology starting in August 2002.
Dr. Hays was the Staff Director of the Subcommittee on Research of the House Committee on Science from the beginning of the 107th Congress until August 2002. Prior to her promotion to Staff Director, Dr. Hays worked as a professional staff member first for the Basic Research Subcommittee and subsequently for the Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics. She first joined the Science Committee’s staff in mid-1999.
Before working for the Committee, Dr. Hays acted as a consultant to Science magazine. While there, she worked on Science’s Next Wave, an Internet-based weekly magazine focused on career and training issues for young scientists.
Prior to her work at Science, Dr. Hays served as an American Association for the Advancement of Science Congressional Science Fellow in the office of Representative Vernon Ehlers. She worked on a Science Committee project assigned to Dr. Ehlers by then-Speaker Newt Gingrich and former Science Committee Chairman F. James Sensenbrenner: to outline an updated science policy for the nation. That effort culminated in a comprehensive Science Committee report entitled Unlocking Our Future: Toward a New National Science Policy.
Before coming to Capitol Hill, Dr. Hays worked as a research assistant at the University of Southern California and then attended graduate school in biochemistry at Stanford University, where she studied in the laboratory of Nobel Laureate Paul Berg and received her Ph.D. in 1997. Dr. Hays also holds a B.A. in Molecular Biology from the University of California, Berkeley.