Catherine Cooksey is an American chemist at the

National Institute of Standards and Technology The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is an agency of the United States Department of Commerce whose mission is to promote American innovation and industrial competitiveness. NIST's activities are organized into physical sci ...

(NIST) in the Sensor Science Division of the Physical Measurement Laboratory. She is responsible for realizing and maintaining NIST's national scale for spectral transmittance at ultraviolet, visible, and near-infrared wavelengths. Cooksey is a leading expert in

spectrophotometry Spectrophotometry is a branch of electromagnetic spectroscopy concerned with the quantitative measurement of the reflection or transmission properties of a material as a function of wavelength. Spectrophotometry uses photometers, known as spec ...

and low uncertainty methods of measuring spectral reflectance and transmittance.

Education

Cooksey earned her

B.S. A Bachelor of Science (BS, BSc, SB, or ScB; from the Latin ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for programs that generally last three to five years. The first university to admit a student to the degree of Bachelor of Science was the University of ...

degree in chemistry at University of Kansas, Lawrence. In 2006, she completed a

Ph.D. A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields. Because it is a ...

in chemistry at University of Washington, Seattle. Her dissertation was titled ''Femtosecond pump-probe studies of chlorine dioxide, dichlorine monoxide, and nitrosyl chloride in solution''.

Career

Cooksey joined the

in 2007. Cooksey is best known for her research on the spectral reflectance of human skin, which has been featured in numerous news outlets. The work earned her a NIST Bronze Medal Award in 2018.

Awards

Cooksey is the recipient of several awards including the NIST Bronze Medal Award (2018) for her work in creating a database of human skin reflectance values and the Judson C. French Award (2018) for her contributions to the development of the United States national reference instrument for reflectance: Robotic Optical Scattering Instrument (ROSI).

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Cooksey, Catherine Living people National Institute of Standards and Technology people 20th-century American chemists 21st-century American chemists American women chemists University of Kansas alumni University of Washington alumni Year of birth missing (living people) 20th-century American women scientists 21st-century American women scientists