William R. Ott

Dr. William R. Ott is the Deputy Director of the Physical Measurement Laboratory of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), a 200 million dollar organization with approximately 560 full-time employees and another 500 guest scientists and temporary staff. The Laboratory is recognized throughout the world for its excellent research and technical services. Laboratory staff have won almost all the major technical awards, including three Nobel Prizes in Physics. 

Dr. Ott has served as Chief of the Radiation Physics Division of the National Bureau of Standards (now NIST), Chief of the NIST Electron and Optical Physics Division, Deputy Director of the NIST Center for Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics, and Deputy Director of the NIST Physics Laboratory. He was an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the Universität Düsseldorf in 1977-78, and is a Fellow of the Optical Society of America, the American Physical Society, and the Washington Academy of Sciences. 

His personal research has been in the fields of electron-atom collisions, plasma spectroscopy, ultraviolet radiation technology, and optical metrology. He pioneered the use of plasma discharges as radiometric standards in the near and vacuum ultraviolet region of the spectrum and collaborated with NASA-funded principal investigators on the radiometric calibrations of space experiments, from the first Skylab measurements of solar radiation to the Hubble Space Telescope. He has published 69 technical papers and reports, given numerous talks, and participated in organizing conferences and workshops. From 2000-2011 he championed the Physics Laboratory's development of measurement methods and standards for applications in biophysics, quantitative medical imaging, and nanomedicine.  

He is fluent in German, has a working knowledge of Italian, is an accomplished pianist, and enjoys tennis and running for exercise. He has been an active member of his church for more than 30 years.