Mourou, Gérard Albert, 1944–, French physicist, Ph.D. Pierre and Marie Curie Univ. (now part of Sorbonne Univ.), 1973. Mourou was a professor at the Univ. of Rochester, New York, from 1977 to 1988, when he joined the faculty at the Univ. of Michigan. He returned to France in 2005 and was director of the Laboratory of Applied Optics at the École Polytechnique until 2009. In 2018 he shared half of the Nobel Prize in Physics with Donna Strickland, his former doctoral student, for chirped pulse amplification, a method of generating high-intensity, ultra-short optical pulses that was developed in the 1980s and is now used in laser machining and corrective laser eye surgery. The other half of the prize was awarded to Arthur Ashkin.
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