Oral History:Judah Levine (2019)

Judah Levine was born in New York City in 1940. He attended Yeshiva College and received a degree of Bachelor of Arts in 1960 with a major in physics and a minor in mathematics. He then went to graduate school at New York University, and was awarded the degree of Master of Science in 1962 and Doctor of Philosophy in 1966. He visited the Clarendon Laboratory of Oxford University as a post-doc from 1966-67 and then was a postdoc at JILA, an institute operated jointly by the University of Colorado and NBS/NIST from 1967-1969. He joined the National Bureau of Standards in 1969, where he worked on various applications of frequency-stabilized lasers including laser radar systems and a 30 m interferometer that he used for various geophysical studies. He moved to the Time and Frequency division of NBS in 1972 and has worked in many areas of time and frequency since that time. His work in includes the design and realization of the NBS/NIST time scale that is used to compute UTC(NIST) and a number of applications to distribute time and frequency information to users by various digital methods. He is currently a Fellow of NIST and an Adjoint Professor in the University of Colorado, Department of Physics. He has received the Colorado Governor’s award for Research in Innovation Technology, the I. I. Rabi award of the IEEE UFFC Frequency Control Symposium, and two Department of Commerce Gold Medals. As of 2021, he is a staff member of the NIST Time and Frequency Division, and he works on problems of time scale algorithms, the definition of UTC, and digital methods for transmitting time information.