Dr. Leland (Lee) Stone
Past Vice President,
IFPTE Western Federal Area

Lee Stone was appointed to the IFPTE Executive Council in November 2011 to serve out the remainder of Ben Toyama’s term as Western Area Federal Vice President of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers (IFPTE), AFL-CIO & CLC. He was then elected at the IFPTE Convention in 2012, reelected in 2015 and 2018, and served in this position until 2021.

Stone also served as President of Local 30 (NASA, Ames Research Center) from 2009 to 2018 and as President of the NASA Council of IFPTE Locals (NCIL) from 2010 through 2016. Prior to that, he had served as local 30’s Vice President for Legislative Affairs and Legislative Representative of the NCIL.

His labor activities have focused on two key approaches to protecting federal workers.

The first is legislative action. With then-IFPTE Secretary-Treasurer/Legislative Director Matt Biggs, he persuaded NASA’s Authorizers to severely limit the ability to introduce special demonstration personnel systems (like the National Security Personnel System) at NASA and to enact anti-layoff language for NASA employees starting in 2004 continuing through October 2013, preventing a planned Reduction-In-Force. He also has worked to improve NASA’s Appropriations, focusing primarily on enhancing federal investments in Aeronautics, Science, and Space Exploration as a means of promoting American economic competitiveness in Aerospace, as well as a healthy NASA workforce. Through his many years of union legislative advocacy on Capitol Hill, Stone has established himself as a respected authority on NASA in particular, and also on science and technology and federal workforce issues in general. He has been effective at working with lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, particularly when it comes to NASA Appropriations and Authorization matters.

The second is partnership. From 2009 through 2016, he worked to vigorously implement President Obama’s Executive Order 13522, “Creating Labor-Management Forums to Improve Delivery of Government Services.” As co-chair of the Agency’s Labor-Management Forum since its inception, he negotiated a progressive implementation plan at NASA and a number of key agreements, including one to stop the abuse of term appointments and to convert more than a thousand term employees to permanent status. Though this experience of leading a constructive and productive dialog between labor and management at the top of a critical science and technology Agency, he has developed a balanced understanding of how to foster effective labor- management cooperation to deliver better products and services for the American people.

In his technical career, he has worked as a research scientist in the Life Science and Human- Systems Integration Divisions at NASA Ames Research Center since 1990. His technical expertise is in human sensorimotor control with an emphasis on the visual and vestibular interactions underlying hand-eye coordination. In particular, he has studied the adverse effects of aerospace relevant conditions on human performance (e.g., altered gravity, vibration). He has developed and validated promising new technologies for the non-invasive assessment of human neural health and performance with an eye towards aerospace and biomedical applications. As an expert in Human-System Integration, he has focused on optimizing the interactions between humans and automated systems with an eye towards overall system performance and safety.

Stone was born in Washington D.C., grew up in the D.C. area, and received a B.A in Biophysics from the Johns Hopkins University. He then moved west and received an M.S. in Engineering from the University of California at Berkeley and a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the University of California at San Francisco. He has lived in San Francisco for more than three decades, an empty nester and proud father of two daughters he raised as a single parent. .