“Accurate measurement: the vital backbone of Australian science & industry”

Dr Laurie Besley, Chief Executive & Chief Metrologist, National Measurement Institute

Wednesday 1 July 2009 at 7 pm
Conference Room 1, Darlington Centre, University of Sydney

Measurement pervades all aspects of our society, from the sale of food by weight in the supermarket, to the management of data transfer systems to better than nanosecond precision for the telecommunications sector. The National Measurement Institute (NMI) is the national core of Australia’s expertise in measurement and has the responsibility to address this entire spectrum of needs. It not only maintains, develops and disseminates the primary measurement standards for Australia in physics, chemistry and biology, but also operates specialist laboratories based on these measurement skills, such as a mainstream forensic laboratory, Australia’s only WADA-accredited sports drugs laboratory, and a high-voltage laboratory for the electrical utilities. The talk will discuss how NMI addresses this myriad of challenges and outline the outcomes to Australia from its activities.

Dr Besley’s scientific and management career has spanned a diversity of fields. including, for the last dozen years, metrology in chemistry. After beginning his career in cryogenic temperature measurement and spending 20 years working in physical metrology, he applied his PhD in chemistry to transplanting the metrological approach from physics to chemistry and initiated work in this area within what was then the National Measurement Laboratory (NML) in Australia. He then became Director of the National Analytical Reference Laboratory within the Australian government body AGAL. When AGAL and NML both became part of the new organisation NMI in 2004, he was first appointed to a role as general manager of the metrology in chemistry branch and late in 2007 was given his present role as Chief Executive. Dr Besley has a publication list of some 75 journal publications in a variety of different fields of metrology.

Dr Besley is a member of the Royal Australian Chemical Institute and a Fellow of the Institute of Physics (UK). He is also a member of the NATA Council. He is active in a number of international forums including being a consultant to the Executive Committee of the Asia-Pacific Metrology Programme. He is a member of the editorial boards of the international journals “Metrologia”, “IET Science Measurement & Technology”, and “Accreditation and Quality Assurance”. He has worked on a number of occasions as a consultant for the Technical Cooperation programme of the German metrology institute (PTB), mostly in Thailand, and most recently in Sri Lanka.