Free for CPIA Members!
NIST’s mission ‘To promote U.S. innovation and industrial competitiveness by advancing measurement science, standards, and technology in ways that enhance economic security and improve our quality of life’ includes many optics and photonics based technologies. Colorado is lucky to have NIST in our backyard, stimulating innovation, fostering industrial competitiveness, and improving our quality of life. We will hear from:
Dr. Scott Diddams – A Fellow of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and an Adjoint Professor at the University of Colorado. He carries out experimental research in the fields of precision spectroscopy and metrology, nonlinear optics, microwave photonics and ultrafast lasers. He received the Ph.D. degree from the University of New Mexico in 1996. From 1996 through 2000, he did postdoctroral work at JILA, NIST and the University of Colorado. Since 2000, Diddams has been a staff physicist at NIST. Present research focuses on the development of optical frequency combs and their use in optical clocks, tests of fundamental physics, novel spectroscopy in the visible and mid-infrared, and ultralow noise frequency synthesis.
Dr. Laura Sinclair – A physicist in the Applied Physics Division at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). She is recognized for pioneering new robust optical tools based on fiber frequency combs that operate outside well-controlled laboratory environments. Dr. Sinclair’s internationally acclaimed comb research has been applied to time transfer across large distances and precision measurements of airborne contaminants in turbulent environments, dramatically increasing observation periods from hours to weeks.Dr. Sinclair received a B.S. from the California Institute of Technology in 2004 and then a Ph.D., graduating from the University of Colorado, Boulder in 2011. She was a post-doc at NIST Boulder, including as a National Research Council (NRC) post-doctoral fellow, before joining the staff.
Dr. MIchelle Stephens – An applied physicist who has made significant contributions to photonics-based science in space across a career spanning academia, industry, and government. Stephens began her research career under the tutelage of Rainer Wiess in the 1980s, undertaking experiments and developing novel hardware in the pursuit of gravitational wave observation. Since then, Stephens has made key technical and leadership contributions to a number of highly successful projects and missions. While a chief systems engineer at Ball Aerospace, she led both the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiments (GRACE and GRACE Follow On missions), and worked on the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) hyperspectral imager. Most recently, she has been leading NIST’s contribution to our knowledge of the Earth’s warming through the Black Array of Broadband and Absolute Radiometers (BABAR), an Earth radiation imager which allows precisions measurements of the Earth’s radiation budgets — the energy arriving from the Sun and leaving the Earth.