Nancy Haegel is center director of the Materials Science Center in the Materials, Chemical, and Computational Science Directorate at NREL. Prior to joining NREL in 2014, she was a distinguished professor of physics at the Naval Postgraduate School. Previously, she held faculty positions at Fairfield University and UCLA. Her research interests are in electronic materials and materials physics, imaging of electronic transport, high resistivity semiconductors, characterization of solar cells, and nuclear radiation detectors. She contributed to the development of the infrared detectors on the Spitzer Space Telescope. In addition to the U.S. Department of Energy, her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, Research Corporation, NASA, the Office of Naval Research, and the Department of Homeland Security.  
  
As a professor, Haegel received the UCLA TRW Excellence in Teaching Award, the Alpha Sigma Nu Teacher of the Year Award at Fairfield University, and the Naval Postgraduate School's Schieffelin Award for Teaching Excellence. She received the 2004 APS Prize to a Faculty Member for Research in an Undergraduate Institution. Haegel was a Humboldt Foundation Scholar, a Fulbright Senior Scholar at Hebrew University, and a Kellogg Foundation Fellow. She is the author of approximately 140 publications. She received her undergraduate degree from the University of Notre Dame and her doctorate in materials science and engineering from the University of California at Berkeley.