Senate Confirms Raman to Lead NIST

The Senate confirmed Arvind Raman as the next director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and under secretary of commerce for standards and technology on Tuesday. 

Raman’s nomination was confirmed by the Senate under a resolution including nearly 50 different nominations for positions across federal agencies and federal judiciary branches. 

He was nominated by Trump in October 2025. During his Senate confirmation hearing in March, Raman advanced largely on a party line vote of 16-12. 

This role will be Raman’s first in federal service. Most recently, Raman served as the dean of Purdue University’s College of Engineering, where he was a professor of mechanical engineering since 2012. While working at Purdue, Raman also served as a principal investigator and director of the LASER PULSE Consortium, a global partnership funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development. 

During his confirmation hearing, Raman vowed to accelerate and scale technological innovation through partnerships across industries, and with entrepreneurs and stakeholders.  

He also committed to supporting President Donald Trump’s AI Action Plan by “maximizing innovation in the entire AI tech stack, including chips in biotechnology, in the quantum industrial base and advanced manufacturing.” 

Raman also committed to developing a common standard for AI technologies to accelerate their development and deployment and to funding the Manufacturing Extension Partnership program. 

Raman received a degree in mechanical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi; a master’s degree from Purdue; and a doctorate in mechanical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley.   

Craig Burkhardt had been serving as the acting director of NIST since January 2025.