As a physicist in the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Time and Frequency Division, I have worked in the general area of operating atomic clocks and using output signals from them to distribute time and frequency information for more than 40 years. I am also a Fellow at JILA, an institute operated jointly by NIST and the University of Colorado at Boulder, and I teach in the physics department of the university.

I came to Boulder in 1967 as a post-doc at JILA. I joined NIST when it was still the National Bureau of Standards in 1969, and I was initially a physicist in the Radio Standards Physics Division. This division was engaged in several research projects that used lasers whose wavelengths were stabilized by adjusting them to match the wavelengths naturally absorbed by an atom or molecule.

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