Samuel Stein was born in 1946 in New York, NY. He received the B.S. and M.S. degrees from Brown University and then a Ph.D. in Physics in 1974 from Stanford University. He worked for the U.S. Gov’t 
from 1974 to 1984 where he eventually held the position of Chief of the NIST Time and Frequency Division. During those years, he developed a career long passion for time and frequency metrology and invented the technology still used to measure the clocks in the NIST time scale.
After departing the Government, Dr Stein joined Ball Efratom Division, where his team developed a commercial prototype passive hydrogen maser and he invented an improved time-scale algorithm. In 1991, Dr Stein left Ball to start his own company, Timing Solutions Corporation, which specialised in high performance timing systems for the U.S. Department of Defense.
Timing Solutions is best known for its two-way optical time transfer systems with sub-picosecond precision and a series of ultra-low-noise measurement instruments including the first direct-digital phase-noise measurement instrument. This device finally achieved Dr. Stein’s dream of making complicated clock measurements accessible to engineers who were not timing experts and he received the C.B. Sawyer Memorial Award for his technical contributions and leadership.
After the sale of Timing Solutions to Symmetricom/Microsemi, Dr Stein served as Chief Scientist and spent the last five years of his career managing advanced clock development at Microsesmi’s Beverly MA location before retiring in 2018.