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NIST Physicists are Finalists for Service to America Medals

Two physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have been named finalists for the 2008 Service to America Medals, presented by the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service to celebrate excellence in federal civil service.

NIST Fellow Judah Levine is one of five finalists for the Career Achievement Medal, which will recognize "a federal employee for significant accomplishments throughout a lifetime of achievement in public service." Levine has worked for three decades at NIST's Boulder, Colo., campus in the Time and Frequency Division, helping create a system for synchronizing time that is used by financial markets and computer networks and accessed more than 2.5 billion times a day.

NIST scientist Joshua Pomeroy is one of four finalists for the Call to Service Medal, which will "recognize a federal employee whose professional achievements reflect the important contributions that a new generation brings to public service." At NIST's Gaithersburg campus, Pomeroy has employed highly charged ion beams to reduce the size of magnetic sensors used to read data on disk drives. The work promises further miniaturization in data storage.

Pomeroy and Levine are among the 29 finalists chosen from nearly 500 nominations submitted by federal agencies. The medal winners will be announced at an evening ceremony on Tuesday, Sept. 16. More information on the medals and the finalist citations may be found online.

Released September 16, 2008, Updated January 23, 2023