As FRIB scientific director, Alexandra Gade ensures that the scientific promise of FRIB is achieved by an active user community in alignment with the evolving capabilities of the facility. She convenes the FRIB Program Advisory Committee to solicit peer advice on allocation of beam time and other scientific issues, and collaborates with the FRIB Division Directors and the Chief Scientist to ensure that user-related activities lead to realization of FRIB’s scientific vision.

Alexandra joined the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory (NSCL) in 2002. In 2006, she became an assistant professor at Michigan State University (MSU), where she is now a professor of physics at FRIB and in the MSU Department of Physics and Astronomy. She served as the NSCL chief scientist from 2015 to 2022.

Her research focuses on the structure of the atomic nucleus in the regime of very unbalanced proton and neutron numbers. Alexandra is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and also a fellow of the American Physical Society. She has been a member of the Nuclear Science Advisory Committee to the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation. As NSCL chief scientist, Alexandra has played a major role in assembling white papers on rare isotope research and defining critical instrumentation needed in the FRIB era. She has served on national and international committees, including American Physical Society committees and advisory committees of the Argonne Tandem Linac Accelerator System (ATLAS) at Argonne National Laboratory, GANIL (France), TRIUMF (Canada), RIKEN Nishina Center (Japan), and GSI/FAIR (Germany). Alexandra has earned several national and international awards, including the Szymański Prize (2015), the DOE Outstanding Junior Investigator award (2008), and the Alfred Sloan fellowship (2008).

Alexandra received her PhD in physics in 2002 from the University of Cologne in Germany. She then moved to a postdoctoral appointment at NSCL.