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Elizabeth Donley (Fed)

Chief of the Time and Frequency Division

Elizabeth Donley has been with the NIST Time and Frequency Division since 2002. She is an experimental physicist by training, with research experience in Bose-Einstein condensation, the maintenance and development of NIST’s atomic fountain clocks, NMR gyroscopes, and the development of compact cold-atom clocks and inertial sensors. She has authored or co-authored close to 100 papers in technical journals. She has been serving as Chief of the Time and Frequency Division since November of 2018.

Her service to the time and frequency community includes organizing symposia and training at national and international conferences, serving as VP for Frequency Control for the IEEE UFFC Society, and advising graduate students from the University of Colorado. She has also served as the Working Group Chair for the revision of two IEEE standards on the topic of frequency control.

Awards

IEEE C.B. Sawyer Memorial Award, 2022

UFFC Distinguished Service Award, 2022

Department of Commerce Gold Medals, 2004 and 2014

CO-LABS Governor's Award for High-Impact Research in Foundational Technology in 2013

JILA Scientific Achievement Award, 2002

Silver Medal Thesis Prize from the ETH Zürich, 2000 

Publications

Roadmap towards the redefinition of the second

Author(s)
C Rieck, T Ido, M Wouters, Y Hanado, M Fujieda, PO Hedekvist, PE Pottie, J Bartholomew, J Hanssen, A Malimon, N Ashby, P Defraigne, Elizabeth Donley, I Sesia, H Schnatz, P Dube, N Dimarc, F Levi, H Margolis, S Slyusarev, M Yasuda, S Bize, D Calonico, David B. Newell, JP Uzan, M Gertsvolf, C Oates, E Peik, S Weyers, DH Yu, G Mileti, P Tavella, F Meynadier, G Petit, G Panfilo, F Fang, J Lodewyck
This paper outlines the roadmap towards the redefinition of the second recently updated by the CCTF Task Force created by the CCTF in 2020. The main

Point-source atom interferometer gyroscope

Author(s)
Azure Hansen, Yun-Jhih Chen, John Kitching, Elizabeth Donley
Point-source atom interferometry (PSI) with cold atoms in a centimeter-scale vacuum cell has applications in inertial navigation. PSI uses light pulses in a

A Resilient Architecture for the Realization and Distribution of Coordinated Universal Time to Critical Infrastructure Systems in the United States: Methodologies and Recommendations from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)

Author(s)
Jeffrey Sherman, Ladan Arissian, Roger Brown, Matthew J. Deutch, Elizabeth Donley, Vladislav Gerginov, Judah Levine, Glenn Nelson, Andrew Novick, Bijunath Patla, Tom Parker, Benjamin Stuhl, Jian Yao, William Yates, Michael A. Lombardi, Victor Zhang, Douglas Sutton
The Time and Frequency Division of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), an agency of the United States Department of Commerce (DOC), was
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Patents (2018-Present)

Schematic of magnetometer/gyroscope shows layers with photodetectors on top and laser at bottom.

Compact Atomic Magnetometer and Gyroscope

NIST Inventors
John Kitching and Elizabeth Donley
An atomic magnetometer that simultaneously achieves high sensitivity, simple fabrication and small size. This design is based on a diverging (or converging) beam of light that passes through an alkali atom vapor cell and that contains a distribution of beam propagation vectors. The existence of more
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Created July 30, 2019, Updated December 8, 2022