Helen K. Holt

Helen K. Holt, born Helen Keil, died on September 29, 2016. She was born in 1937 in West Palm Beach, Florida. As a young woman, Helen excelled in tennis and was ranked nationally as a junior. She won a number of junior championships in Florida. Helen attended Barnard College in New York City. While there she met and married Lawrence Holt. After receiving a bachelor degree in physics from Barnard, Helen went on to graduate school at Yale University, where she did thesis work under the well-known physicist Vernon Hughes. She received her Ph. D. degree from Yale in 1966 and came to the National Bureau of Standards (now the National Institute of Standards and Technology, NIST) to work on the theory of atomic processes relevant to gas lasers. She was a member of the Quantum Metrology Group, publishing about fifteen papers in this area, almost all of them in the Physical Review or Physical Review Letters. For most of these papers, she was the sole author.

Helen was an avid reader and a student of literature, history, art, and politics. While at NIST, she enjoyed mentoring younger staff members, especially young interns who sought advice about where to go the graduate school. Helen had strong opinions about the quality of education to be obtained from various schools.

For most of her time at NBS Helen lived in Bethesda, Maryland. In 1986, due to health considerations, Helen took early retirement from NIST. However, she continued for a while as Guest Researcher. In 2013 Helen and Larry moved to Riderwood Village in Silver Spring, Maryland. Helen is survived by her husband, Larry, her daughters Daphne Holt and Leslie Holt, her granddaughter Meti Holt, and her sister Jane Groves.