Patrick Gill is a Senior NPL Fellow in the Time & Frequency Department. He joined NPL in 1975 after completing his DPhil thesis on gas laser excitation mechanisms at the University of Oxford. His initial research at NPL involved iodine-stabilised lasers for the realisation of the SI metre, before starting research on laser cooled ions and atoms as high accuracy frequency standards and optical clocks for a future redefinition of the SI second.

Patrick became a Fellow of the Institute of Physics in 1998. He is a visiting professor at Imperial College since 1998 and at the University of Oxford since 2006. He was awarded an MBE for services to Science in The Queen's New Year's Honours List 2015, and was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2016. He has been awarded various medals and prizes over the last two decades, including the I I Rabi Award by the IEEE International Frequency Control Symposium in 2007, the 2008 Young Medal by the Institute of Physics and the 2019 European Frequency & Time Forum Lifetime Achievement award. In 2020 he was awarded the Rumford Medal from the Royal Society.