The National Institute of Standards and Technology, located just outside Washington DC, has a 12-week Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) program providing hands-on research experience in seven laboratories: Building and Fire Research, Chemical Science and Technology, Electronics and Electrical Engineering, Information Technology, Manufacturing Engineering, Materials Science & Engineering, or Physics..

The Electron and Optical Physics Division of the Physics Laboratory has operated the Synchrotron Ultraviolet Radiation Facilty (now SURF III) electron storage ring at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) for over 30 years.

The SURF III magnetic field is being improved by a factor of 50, allowing irradiance calculations to be made with much higher accuracy than SURF II could achieve. SURF III will be able to store electrons at energies as high as 400 MeV, compared to 300 MeV for SURF II. The higher electron energy will extend the usable range of radiation from SURF to shorter wavelengths, enabling experiments in the "water window" from 2.3 nm to 4.4 nm.