Fred K. Y. Lo became Director of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) on September 1, 2002. He succeeded Paul A. Vanden Bout, who served as NRAO Director from January 1,1985, to June 1,2002. Prior to his appointment at the NRAO, Dr. Lo served as a Distinguished Research Fellow and Director of the Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics of the Academia Sinica, located in Taipei. Dr. Lo’s second five year term as Director of NRAO began in 2007.

Lo received his bachelor's and doctorate degrees in Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in 1969 and 1974 respectively. He joined the California Institute of Technology in 1974 as a Research Fellow in Radio Astronomy. In 1976, Lo went to the University of California at Berkeley as a Miller Fellow. Two years later, he returned to Caltech where he held various research and teaching positions until 1986.

In 1986, Lo accepted the position of Professor of Astronomy at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, serving as department chairman from 1995 to 1997. Lo became Director of the Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics (ASIAA) in Taipei, Taiwan, in May 1997. He also accepted the post of Professor of Physics at the National Taiwan University in 1998.

Lo is an accomplished radio astronomer with very wide research interests. His studies range from surveys for intergalactic HI clouds, star formation in different environments such as dwarf galaxies and starbursts in near and very distant galaxies, to the determination of the structure of Sagittarius A* — the compact radio source at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. His current research concerns a key project to determine the Hubble Constant to high accuracy, using water mega-masers in galactic nuclei to measure angular diameter distance to galaxies, in order to place better constraints on the Dark Energy equation of state.

From almost 30 years of involvement in the construction and scientific use of U.S. millimeter-wave and sub-millimeter-wave interferometer arrays, he made the first millimeter-wave interferometric map of carbon monoxide emission from an external galaxy. In 1986, with Mark Claussen, now at NRAO, Lo made the original suggestion that luminous water maser emission (mega-masers) in external galaxies is circum-nuclear instead of circum-stellar, and can serve as a very high resolution probe of the very centers of galaxies. In Taiwan, he oversaw the successful participation by the ASIAA in the Sub-Millimeter Array (SMA) project by building two of the eight SMA telescopes with the attendant SIS receivers. He also led an effort to build an array to study the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation, the echo of the Big Bang.

Since becoming the NRAO Director, Lo has worked to optimize the scientific impact of the NRAO in close partnership with the scientific community, by ensuring the successful construction of two major new facilities: the EVLA project and the international ALMA project, and by developing enhanced user support for the larger astronomy community for next generation facilities.