Shannon Duff Receives 2024 Arthur S. Flemming Award

Shannon Duff has received a 2024 Arthur S. Flemming Award in the Applied Science and Engineering category for her outstanding federal service in establishing a program to produce sensor arrays for measurements of the cosmic microwave background. Under Shannon's direct involvement and leadership, this program has increased the capabilities of individual sensors, the size of arrays, and the array production rate. 

Composed of thousands of microfabricated superconducting sensors cooled to temperatures near absolute zero, these arrays image faint microwave signals from the earliest light. Duff’s pioneering work enables instruments that measure the most fundamental properties of the universe, including its age, rate of expansion, and the densities of regular matter, dark matter, and dark energy. 

A recent key milestone was her delivery of more than 70,000 sensors spread over forty silicon wafers for the most powerful observatory of its kind. These successes have prompted an even more expansive distributed observatory with multiple government agency stakeholders. The innovative processes developed by Duff’s program have been applied to additional emerging applications, including circuits for quantum computing and infrared light detection.