Because of the many services provided by NIST, it is a multi-disciplinary environment. NIST employs physicists, chemists and engineers of all types, computer scientists, applied mathematicians, and statisticians. I consider NIST a rich and exciting place at which to work. Not only do I have the opportunity to use my education in probability and statistics, but also my undergraduate training in physics and chemistry.

Before joining NIST, I taught mathematics and statistics at the University of Virginia and at Dartmouth College. Now, as a member of the Statistical Engineering Division, my duties are to consult with NIST staff on problems relating to probability and mathematical statistics and to do research on new approaches to such problems.

NIST is a government laboratory with two locations: Gaithersburg, Maryland, and Boulder, Colorado. Its mission is to provide standards for measurements used nationwide and to provide measurement services to support industrial technology. Accurate instruments and products are developed. This process involves several steps of experimentation and analysis. For example, many measurement processes require the accurate and precise measurement of fundamental constants such as Avogadro's number, the charge of the electron, the proton-electron mass, or the speed of light. Accurate measurement of the speed of light was required, for example, to determine the length of the meter. The meter is currently defined as the length of the path traveled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299,792,458 of a second, and therefore its accuracy is determined by the accuracy of the measurement of the second.