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Nobel Prize

Cornell and Wieman Win 2001 Physics Prize

Eric A. Cornell of NIST and Carl E. Wieman of the University of Colorado at Boulder have received the 2001 Nobel Prize in physics, along with Wolfgang Ketterle of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Cornell, 39, is a senior scientist at NIST and an adjoint professor of physics at CU-Boulder. Wieman, 50, is a distinguished professor of physics and has taught at CU-Boulder since 1984. Both are fellows of JILA, a joint institute of CU-Boulder and NIST.

2001 Nobel Prize in Physics Laureates Eric Cornell, NIST (left), and Carl Wieman, University of Colorado at Boulder (right), with the apparatus used to achieve the Bose-Einstein condensate. Photo: University of Colorado at Boulder, Office of News Services

The three winners will share the $943,000 prize for research leading to the landmark 1995 creation of Bose-Einstein condensate and the early study of its properties. The condensate is a new form of matter that occurs at just a few hundred billionths of a degree above absolute zero.

Cornell and Wieman become the second and third Nobel Prize winners at CU-Boulder, while Cornell is the second for NIST. Thomas Cech, a CU-Boulder professor of chemistry and biochemistry, was a co-winner of the 1989 Nobel Prize in chemistry. William Phillips, a NIST fellow, shared the 1997 Nobel Prize in physics.

For more information, go to www.nist.gov/nobel2001 on the World Wide Web.

Media Contact:
Collier Smith, Boulder, (303) 497-3198

 

Quality

Thirteen Organizations in Final Running for 2001 Baldrige Award

Starting Oct. 14, 2001, teams of business, education, health care and quality experts will visit 13 organizations—two manufacturers, two service companies, three small businesses, four education organizations and two health care organizations—as the final review stage for the 2001 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. This is the largest number of site visits since 1995 when there also were 13 finalists for the award. Thirty-seven organizations applied for the 2001 award, including seven manufacturers, four service companies, eight small businesses, 10 education organizations and eight health care organizations.

Site-visit team members will visit all of the 13 organizations to verify information in the application, examine each organization's records, conduct interviews and clarify any issues or questions raised by earlier reviews. The site-visit teams are comprised of six to eight members of the Baldrige Award’s private-sector board of examiners. The board’s panel of judges will review the site-visit findings and recommend award recipients to the Secretary of Commerce. All 37 applicants receive an extensive feedback report highlighting strengths and opportunities for improvement.

Baldrige award recipients for 2001 are expected to be announced in late November by the President and the Secretary of Commerce.

Media Contact:
Jan Kosko, (301) 975-2767

 

Grants

NIST Launches New Information Technology Security Effort

On Oct. 2, 2001, NIST awarded $5 million for nine research grants that will enhance security for the nation’s critical infrastructures such as electrical grids and air traffic control systems.

The awards under the Critical Infrastructure Protection Grants Program will accelerate efforts to make the computer and telecommunications systems that support essential services more secure. Many critical infrastructures—the physical and cyber-based systems that are essential to the nation’s economy—are increasingly automated and interdependent.

The agency received 133 applications (totaling more than $73 million in requests) for the available $5 million in funding. Scientists at NIST reviewed the proposals, and 98 reviewers from eight other federal agencies also participated in the selection process.

Following are brief descriptions of the nine research projects selected:

For more information on the CIPG program, go to http://csrc.nist.gov/grants/.

Media Contact:
Philip Bulman, (301) 975-5661

 

 

Education

Texas Educator ‘Learning and Teaching’ in Baldrige Office

Celani Dominguez, a physics teacher at Reagan High School in Austin, Texas, will work at NIST during the coming year to learn more about the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award program and help the Baldrige program better understand the needs of education organizations. An education category was added to the Baldrige Award in 1999.

Dominguez is working at NIST under the auspices of the Albert Einstein Distinguished Educator Fellowship Program. The program offers elementary and secondary science and mathematics teachers year-long fellowships to serve on Capitol Hill and in federal agencies. It is administered by the U.S. Department of Energy and the Triangle Coalition for Science and Technology Education.

Dominguez has been a Texas Association of Minorities in Engineering sponsor; has been awarded the National Unsung Heroes award for producing bilingual videotapes of science labs and classes for non-English speaking students; and has worked with the Capital Area Training Foundation and Motorola, IBM, and Dell corporations to coordinate mentoring and grant programs to enhance the science classes she serves.

For more about Dominguez, go to www.triangle-coalition.org/ fellows/dominguez.htm on the web. Online information about the Einstein Fellowships is available at www.triangle-coalition.org/ein.htm.

Media Contact:
Jan Kosko, (301) 975-2767

 

 

Priority Setting

Biomedical Devices: Globally Accepted Standards Needed

When it comes to standards and measurements, the $42 billion biomedical device industry has a lengthy to-do list—a reflection of the quickening pace of innovation and the regulatory complexity of global markets. In fact, a new NIST publication lists more than 60 priority tasks.

Distributed across five categories of technology and two cross-cutting areas, measurement and standards-related needs range from tests that better predict the stability of implanted materials to more accurate methods for characterizing cells and their derivatives.

Gleaned from a June 2001 workshop attended by industry and government representatives, these priorities will help to guide NIST’s future research and services. Many recommendations focus on specific technical needs, such as improving the reliability and comparability of computer models used to evaluate how prototype devices will perform in the body. Common to most technology areas assessed at the workshop, however, is the desire for greater uniformity in regulatory requirements among nations. Workshop participants agreed that widespread use of globally accepted standards would reduce redundancy and help speed the introduction of new products and services.

NIST has identified the nation’s $1.1 trillion health care sector as one of three “strategic focus areas” that it will emphasize in future activities (the others being nanotechnology and information and knowledge management). The institute already provides a variety of technical services to the sector. For example, about 10 percent of the 32,000 NIST Standard Reference Materials sold in 2000 were used to support clinical services or for other health-related purposes.

The summary of the Workshop on Biomedical Materials and Devices (NIST IR 6791) is available on-line. You can find it on NIST’s Health Care Industry web page at http://www.nist.gov/public_affairs/healthcare.htm. To obtain a hard copy, contact Carolyn Stull, carolyn.stull@nist.gov. For information on follow-up activities, contact either John A. Tesk, (301) 975-6799, john.tesk@nist.gov; or Lisa Karam, (301) 975-5561, lisa.karam@nist.gov.

Media Contact:
Mark Bello, (301) 975-3776

 

 

Trade

New Service Alerts U.S. Exporters to Pending Foreign Regulations

The U.S. Department of Commerce has launched a free Internet-based service to automatically notify interested businesses of proposed foreign-government regulations that might influence the treatment of U.S. exports.

Available from NIST, with support from the International Trade Administration, the new service—called Export Alert! — can spare interested organizations from unwanted surprises caused by unanticipated changes in technical requirements that dictate terms of market entry.

The service was inaugurated during World Standards Week (Oct. 8-12, 2001), an annual event intended to recognize the roles that standards play in society. Standards often are incorporated into the technical requirements of government regulations.

Export Alert! gathers, organizes and disseminates notifications of proposed regulatory changes issued by any of 142 nations that are members of the World Trade Organization. Under the Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade, WTO members are required to report proposed central government regulations that may have an impact on trade.

By electronic mail, Export Alert! automatically sends WTO-distributed notifications to subscribers. Notifications are sorted among 41 fields of activity that range from health-care technology to construction materials. To receive full-text copies of the proposals, interested subscribers can contact NIST’s National Center for Standards and Certification Information, which operates the service. NCSCI also will distribute comments from U.S. organizations for consideration by the notifying country.

Organizations and individuals interested in subscribing to Export Alert! can sign up on-line at http://ts.nist.gov/ncsci. For additional information, contact NCSCI at (301) 975-4040 or ncsci@nist.gov.

Media Contact:
Mark Bello, (301) 975-3776