Rod White

Rod White

His contributions include breakthroughs in the understanding of reflection errors in industrial radiation thermometry, major improvements to the triple point of water cells used to define the kelvin, new mathematical methods for calculating the uncertainty in resistance thermometry, a novel method for calibrating resistance thermometry bridges, and laying the theoretical foundation for high-accuracy Johnson noise thermometry. 

Rod is on several of the CIPM’s international committees that monitor and maintain the temperature scale, and is chairman of the working group on uncertainty in temperature. He is the coauthor of the textbook Traceable Temperatures, won the NZ Royal Society Science and Technology Medal in 1997 for contributions to temperature metrology, and won the Royal Society Cooper Medal in 1998 for the work on resistance bridge calibration.

In 2007 Rod spent six-months at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) at Boulder in Colorado, where he was a guest researcher working on the NIST Johnson noise thermometry project, which aims to measure temperature directly in terms of fundamental constants.  Rod assisted NIST with the design of their project when they started in 2000, and the 2007 visit helped them to fine tune their measurement to enable them to make a measurement of the Boltzmann constant.

More recently, Rod spent two months at the National Institute of Metrology (NIM) in Beijing, China, to establish a series of collaborative thermometry projects between the Measurement Standards Laboratory at IRL, and NIM.