Appointment of Dr P. Tavella as the Director of the BIPM Time Department

Dr Tavella is currently a Research Director at the Istituto Nazionale di Ricerca Metrologica (INRIM), responsible for the UTC(IT) Laboratory and the Galileo Timing Research Infrastructure. She is deeply involved in the design and testing of the European GNSS Galileo timing system through more than 30 European projects. Dr Tavella is the previous Chair of the CCTF Working Groups on International Atomic Time (WGTAI) and Algorithms (WG-ALGO).

In addition, Dr Tavella is a Distinguished Lecturer for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics and Frequency Control Society (UFFC), a member of the IEEE UFFC Administrative Committee, Vice-Chair of the International Union of Radio Science Commission A (URSI Comm A), and Vice-Chair of the European Frequency and Time Forum (EFTF) Executive Committee.

Dr Tavella has considerable experience of time scales and clock modelling, having conceived, designed, and developed, in collaboration with different colleagues, several methods and techniques for the time scale definition and measurement data treatment. These include possible uses and drawbacks of the Kalman filter in the ensemble time scale; contribution to the ensemble algorithm for a pulsar time scale; and the application of stochastic processes to model the atomic clock deviation and survival time within error thresholds, applied also to the determination of calibration interval.

Official announcement: http://www.bipm.org/en/news/full-stories/2017-06/2017-07-new-directors.html.