An expert in cold atom sensing and precision measurement with over sixty published papers and six patents, Stephen Eckel’s current research focuses on using the immutable properties of atoms and molecules to make calibration-free sensors for both temperature and pressure. In 2016, he started as a permanent research physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in the Fundamental Thermodynamics Group developing the cold atom vacuum standard, the only primary standard of vacuum pressure in the ultra-high and extreme-high vacuum regimes. Prior to 2016, he was National Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at the Joint Quantum Institute, a collaborative institute between NIST and the University of Maryland, where he was a working on inertial sensing using ring-shaped Bose-Einstein condensates. He graduated from Yale University with a Ph.D. in Physics in 2012 where his research focused on two different precision measurement searches for the electron’s electric dipole moment.