Gérard Mourou

Mourou.jpg

A. D. Moore Distinguished University Professor Emeritus

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Research profile on Google Scholar

Professor Gérard Mourou was a founding Director of the Center for Ultrafast Optical Science. For more than thirty years, Professor Gérard Mourou has pioneered the field of ultrafast lasers and their applications in scientific, engineering and medical disciplines. With his student Donna Strickland he is an inventor of the Chirped Pulses Amplification (CPA) technique which allowed for amplifying an ultrashort laser pulses to very high optical powers (presently few Petawatts) with the laser pulse being stretched out temporally  prior to amplification. In ophthalmology, his work on the cornea resulted in IntraLASIK technology, marketed by IntraLase used on more than 5 million patients. He is also the initiator of the Extreme Light Infrastructure (ELI) project in Europe. He has been the recipient of the Wood Prize from the Optical Society of America, the Edgerton Prize from the SPIE, the Sarnoff Prize from the IEEE, the 2004 IEEE/LEOS Quantum Electronics Award, the 2005 Willis E. Lamb Award for Laser Science and Quantum Optics and the Charles Hard Townes Award by the OSA (2009), the Frederic Ives Medal / Jarus W. Quinn Prize by the OSA (2016), and the Arthur L. Schawlow Prize in Laser Science by the American Physical Society (2018). He is a fellow of the Optical Society of America and a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. Professor Mourou is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and is also a foreign member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Austrian and Lombardy. In 2012 he was awarded a National Legion of Honor of France.

Professor Mourou was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2018.