Dr. Gretchen Baier is currently Associate R&D Director of External Technology at The Dow Chemical Company. The External Technology Group is responsible for identifying and facilitating sponsored research with universities, research institutes, and other external partners around the world. The team also is responsible for creating a pipeline of R&D collaborations with government agencies and laboratories and developing win-win partnerships. This runs the gamut from user facilities at federal labs, to CRADAs, to WFOs, to winning competitive grants and cooperative agreements, to participating in university research centers, among others.
Currently, Gretchen is Chair of the Advisory Board of the Critical Materials Institute, a Department of Energy Innovation Hub and a Board member for ASTRA, an organization with a mission to ensure that there is an adequate, and growing, investment by the Federal government in basic research in the physical sciences, the mathematical and computational sciences, and engineering. She also is a member of the Industrial Research Institute and the University-Industry Demonstration Partnership organizations. From 2009-2010 Gretchen was a member of the Board for the Council of Chemical Research, and continues to participate in CCR events. CCR is an organization chartered to bring together the industrial, academic, and government sectors to accelerate R&D advancements in the chemical science arena.
Her previous roles in Dow have been as a technical leader in Ventures and New Business Development and as a chemical engineer in the Process Optimization group and the Process Separations Skill Center.
Prior to joining Dow, Gretchen was a Process Engineer at Dow Corning Corporation and later at Shell Oil Company. She has a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Wisconsin at Madison (advised by Professors E.N. Lightfoot and M.D. Graham), a B.S. from M.I.T. and is a licensed Professional Engineer.