Physicists Nicholas Butch, Michael Gullans and William Phillips of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) will be honored with awards for their federal service. Butch and Gullans will receive Arthur S. Flemming Awards for exceptional civil service while pursuing basic science. Phillips will receive the Katharine B. Gebbie Lifetime Achievement Award for Outstanding Federal Service.
Butch, an experimentalist working with the UMD Quantum Materials Center, studies novel electron interactions in materials. He received hi
Nicholas Butchs Ph.D. at the University of California, San Diego, and joined NIST's Center for Neutron Research in 2013. He was appointed to an adjunct position in the Department of Physics that same year. Among his other honors are Fellowship in the American Physical Society, the NIST Samuel Wesley Stratton Award, a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers and the NIST Sigma Xi Katharine Gebbie Young Investigator Award.
Gullans, a physicist in NIST's Nanoscale Device Characterization Division and a Fellow of the 
Michael GullansJoint Center for Quantum Information and Computer Science (QuICS), studies the theoretical realm of quantum information systems and quantum simulators in nonperturbative and strongly-interacting limits. He is the deputy director of the NSF Quantum Leap Challenge Institute for Robust Quantum Simulation. Gullans received his Ph.D. from Harvard University. He held postdoctoral appointments at UMD and Princeton University.
Phillips, a Distinguished University Professor and Fellow of the Joint Quantum Institute, joined NIST in 1978 after receiving his
William D. Phillips Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His awards include the 1997 Nobel Prize (with Steven Chu and Claude Cohen-Tannoudji) for "development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light”. He was first cited with the Gebbie award in 2020, but conferral was delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic. The award honors and recalls Katharine Gebbie, founding Director of NIST's Physical Measurement Laboratory.
Butch, Gullans and Phillips will be honored on November 8, 2026 at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C.