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. Dr. Lo came to the Observatory as a Distinguished Research Fellow and the Director of the Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics of the Academia Sinica, located in Taipei. He started his second 5-year term 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, and served as the chairman of that university's astronomy department 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 star formation in different environments such as dwarf galaxies, starbursts in nearby 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, and more recently he is involved in a key project to determination of the Hubble Constant to high accuracy using water mega-masers in galactic nuclei for angular diameter distance determination to galaxies, in order to place better constraints on the Dark Energy equation of state.

Over almost 30 years, he has been intimately involved in the construction and scientific use of all the millimeter-wave and sub-millimeter-wave interferometer arrays in the United States, and he made the first millimeter-wave interferometric map of carbon dioxide 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 very high resolution probes of the very centers of galaxies. In Taiwan, he oversaw the successful participation by the ASIAA in the Sub-Millimeter Array (SMA) project and led an effort to build an array to study the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation, the echo of the Big Bang.

Since becoming NRAO Director, Lo has been working towards optimizing the scientific impact of the NRAO by developing a closer partnership with the scientific community, by ensuring the successful construction of two major new facilities: the EVLA project and the international ALMA project, by developing enhanced user support to the larger astronomy community, and by partnering with the community to plan the next generation facilities.