Title: Director, Commercialization Practice
Category: Senior Professional
Education: Ph.D.
As a Senior Research Scientist at Northwest Research Associates (NWRA), Bellevue, WA (1986 to 2006), Dr. Fraser wrote 11 successful proposals as principal investigator, most to the Small Business Innovation Research Program. The grants and contracts resulting from these proposals were funded by NIH, CDC, NASA, the US Army, and the US Navy and supported research and development in Doppler ultrasound blood flow measurement, intrabreath respiratory gas analysis, and a variety of software based on Bayesian analysis and rule-based expert systems. Other research at NWRA included development of a pattern recognition (template matching) scheme for the classification of near-shore seafloor geometries and the study of vortex evolution in simulated aircraft wakes. From 1973 to 1985, Dr. Fraser was a Senior Staff Scientist at Thoratec Laboratories Corp. (Berkeley, CA) where he conceived, developed, and carried through to production a new method of respiratory and metabolic monitoring utilizing the spectral components of a DC glow discharge. Four patents were granted. During this time Dr. Fraser was also an associate faculty member at the Pacific Medical Research Center, analyzing the flow patterns in an artificial heart using high-speed cinematography. Dr. Fraser received a Ph.D. in Fluid Dynamics from the University of California at Berkeley, an M.S. in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Arizona, and a B.S. in Physics from the University of Notre Dame. He carried out postdoctoral research at the University of California at San Francisco in the Cardiovascular Research Institute on the effects of altered airway mechanics on pulmonary flows using high-speed analog signal recording and cinematography. Dr. Fraser's Ph.D. dissertation subject was the measurement of density, temperature, velocity, and ionization fraction in a weakly ionized free-jet expansion of argon using electron-beam excitation, Fabry-Perot interferometry, and Langmuir probes.