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Michelle Stephens (Fed)
Physicist
Michelle Stephens is the group lead for the Sources and Detectors Group at NIST.
Dr. Stephens received a B.S. and a Ph.D. in Physics from MIT. For her graduate work she developed seismic isolation systems for laser interferometric gravitational wave detectors. After a postdoc at JILA, studying efficient laser cooling and trapping of Cs and Rb, she joined the Time and Frequency Division at NIST. After two years, she moved to a high-tech start-up company. The company failed after a year, but that was the beginning of an 18-year career in industry. She worked 5 years in R&D and metrology at Research Electro-Optics, a manufacturer of precision optics, and 12 years at Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corporation as an instrument systems engineer on several technology development efforts and Earth remote sensing instrument missions. She returned to NIST in 2015.
