Deborah Crawford is Vice President for Research, Innovation and Economic Impact at George Mason University where she is responsible for coordinating and overseeing the full range of the university’s research and innovation activities. She joined the university in 2016 from the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, CA. For almost two decades, she worked at the National Science Foundation in a number of executive and program management positions, and served as the agency’s liaison to the National Science and Technology Council, the Office of Science and Technology Policy, and the National Institutes of Health. Prior to joining NSF, her research contributions were in high-speed optical and optoelectronic systems in work done at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the University of California Santa Barbara and AT&T Bell Laboratories. She has a PhD in Information Systems Engineering from the University of Bradford and a BSc (Hons) in Electronic & Electrical Engineering from the University of Glasgow.