Development of the Australian Measurement Infrastructure and Its Support for Innovation

by Dr. Laurie Besley, Chief Executive and Chief Metrologist, National Measurement Institute, Australia (NMIA), Australia

        

Dr Laurie Besley is the Chief Executive of the National Measurement Institute, Australia (NMIA) and Australia’s Chief Metrologist.

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 NMIA 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 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”. As an expert on metrology in chemistry, 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 recently in Sri Lanka.

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