Louis Costrell

1915-2009

Louis Costrell received his B.S. in electrical engineering from the University of Maine in 1939. He completed his M.S. in electrical engineering at the University of Maryland in 1949. He was hired by Leon F. Curtiss for a position in the National Bureau of Standards (NBS, now the National Institute of Standards and Technology, NIST) Radioactivity Section in 1946. Costrell was promoted to chief of the Radiation Physics Instrumentation Section in 1951. 

Notable honors and awards: 

• Silver Medal, U.S. Department of Commerce, 1955 
• Gold Medal, U.S. Department of Commerce, 1967 
• Harry Diamond Award of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), 1975
• Life Fellow of the IEEE

Research interests: instrumentation for radiation measurements; radioactivity standardization; organization of professional engineers and physicists at national and international level to develop voluntary consensus standards for nuclear and radiation instrumentation including Nuclear Instrument Modules (NIM) and Computer Aided Measurement and Control (CAMAC) standards