Dr Charles Clark
- Position
- Chair, CAMS Advisory Board
- Institution
- National Institute of Standards and Technology, USA
- Expertise
- Atomic, molecular and optical physics
- Synchrotron radiation and its applications
- Ultracold quantum gases
- Biography
- Charles Clark received his B.A. in mathematics and physics from Western Washington State College in 1974, and a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Chicago in 1979. He spent two years as a postdoctoral research associate at Daresbury Laboratory in the U.K., and returned to the U.S.A., first as a postdoc and then as a member of staff at the National Bureau of Standards, now the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), where he has been ever since. He is a member of the U.S. Senior Executive Service, and is Chief of the Electron and Optical Physics Division and acting Group Leader of the NIST Synchrotron Ultraviolet Radiation Facility (SURF III). Clark serves as Program Manager for Atomic and Molecular Physics, U.S. Office of Naval Research, and is a Fellow of the Joint Quantum Insititute of NIST and the University of Maryland at College Park, and a Visiting Professor at the National University of Singapore. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS), the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Optical Society of America (OSA), the Washington Academy of Sciences, and the Institute of Physics. He has been a Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University; a Dr. Lee Fellow at Christ Church, University of Oxford; and has received the R&D 100 Award, Distinguished Presidential Rank Award of the U.S. Civil Service, Archie Mahan Prize of the OSA, the Physical Sciences Award of the Washington Academy of Sciences, the Gold and Silver Medals of the U.S. Department of Commerce, and the NIST Edward U. Condon, Safety, and Equal Opportunity Awards. During 2005-2006 he served as Chair of the Division of Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics of the APS. Clark's principal current research interests are the dynamics of ultracold atoms and its application to the simulation of condensed matter systems, applications of synchrotron radiation, and the exploitation of atomic and molecular physics processes for new methods of neutron detection.
