Nathan D. Orloff

FIAP Member-at-large
Nathan D. Orloff
National Institute of Standards and Technology, Communications Technology Laboratory, Boulder, CO 80305

Biography:

Nathan (Nate) D. Orloff received the B.S. degree in physics with high honors and Ph.D. degree in physics from the University of Maryland (UMD) at College Park, College Park, MD, USA, in 2004 and 2010, respectively. His doctoral thesis concerned the study and measurement of microwave properties of Ruddelsden-Popper ferroelectrics.

In 2011, he was a Dean’s Postdoctoral Fellow with the Department of Bioengineering, Stanford University. In 2013, he joined the Materials Measurement Laboratory, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Gaithersburg, MD, USA, as a Rice University Postdoctoral Fellow. In 2014, he joined the Communications Technology Laboratory at NIST in Boulder Colorado. Dr. Orloff is currently the Project Leader of the Microwave Materials Project in the Communications Technology Laboratory at NIST in Boulder, Colorado. His research focus is three-fold: materials-by-design for communications, microwave materials metrology, and bridging the gap between optical and microwave on-wafer measurement science.

Dr. Orloff was the recipient of the UMD Dean's Award for Excellence for Teaching, the 2010 Michael J. Pelczar Award for Graduate Study, the 2014 Distinguished Associate at NIST, a Senior Member of the IEEE, and the 2019 Karl Schwartzwalder-Professional Achievement in Ceramic Engineering Award. He has published more than fifty peer-reviewed articles and proceedings. He holds a U.S. Patent on measuring material properties in roll-to-roll manufacturing.

Statement:

As an applied physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, part of my job is to ask, “How can NIST help?”. As the FIAP member-at-large, that question changes to “How can Applied Physics help”. Answering this question to me starts by identifying important problems and new ideas in physics. While these problems will sometimes start through basic research in academia, they can also emerge from problems in industry or at federal research labs. Surfacing these problems and created shared solutions means increasing communications between government, academia, and industry.

To this end, my goals as the FIAP member-at-large will be to:

  1. Build a nexus for industry, government, and academia to exchange ideas and share problems in applied physics, materials, and measurement.
  2. Foster collaboration and shared knowledge at conferences through tutorials, expert panels, engaging industry, and program managers.
  3. Inspire young scientist to challenge conventional problems with new ideas in physics and provide training on proposal writing and public speaking.