Biography | Craig Barrett — The NATO Year at the National Physical Laboratory

The Stanford doctorate in 1964 did not dump him straight onto a California faculty roster.

He spent 1964 and 1965 as a NATO postdoctoral fellow at the National Physical Laboratory on Hampton Road in Teddington.

NPL was, and is, Britain's national measurement laboratory.

It sits on the edge of Bushy Park, a few miles upriver from central London.

The fellowship is the first foreign year in every serious Barrett curriculum.

It is easy to skip.

It is the year a materials scientist trained on the Peninsula learned how a national standards lab actually measures the world.

He came back to Stanford as an assistant professor in 1965.

A later Fulbright year, 1972 to 1973, took him to the Technical University of Denmark.

Those two foreign years are the academic frame around the Intel career that followed.

The Teddington buildings have been added to and rebuilt since the mid-1960s.

The institution is the same.

The pin is the laboratory, not a vanished bench.

Photo: Robert Scoble, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait made in 2008.