Daniel R. Grischkowsky
About Optica
In Memoriam: Daniel Richard Grischkowsky , 1940 - 2022
27 June 2022
Optica Fellow, society volunteer and Emeritus Regents Professor Daniel Grischkowsky passed away on 27 June 2022 at the age of 82. He was best known for his groundbreaking research in Terahertz science and engineering.
Grischkowsky was born on 17 April 1940 in St. Helen, Oregon. He was the first of his family from rural Oregon to attend university and received his Bachelor of Science in Physics at Oregon State University in 1962. In 1968, he earned his PhD in Physics from Columbia University. His professional career began the following year when he accepted a Physics Research position at IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in their Physical Science Department in Yorktown Heights, New York.
In the 1970s at IBM, Grischkowsky worked with dye lasers. During this time, he also researched picosecond pulse propagation in single-mode fibers, eventually showing that pulse broadening was reversible. He worked on optically chirped radar and, along with his colleagues, achieved the shortest continuous optical pulse sequence known at that time. In 1989, Optica (formerly the Optical Society) awarded him the RW Wood prize “for his distinguished contributions to the field of optical pulse propagation, particularly for his pioneering work on the use of optical fibers for generating ultrashort pulses of light.”
Grischkowsky’s research in THz began at IBM, where he and his colleague Christof Fattinger worked on a broadband free space THz time-domain spectrometer. Martin van Exter's arrival culminated in generating the first detailed THz-TDS spectrum of water vapor. In 1993, he moved his research lab from IBM to the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at Oklahoma State University, where he continued his THz time-domain spectroscopy experiments with students and post-docs. Today, THz-TDS spectrometers are operating in more than 100 laboratories globally. Over the course of his career, he published 179 papers in international peer-reviewed journals.
Grischkowsky was an avid Optica volunteer and served on many committees. His positions included the Frontiers in Optics Program Committee, the Optics Letters Editors, the Nonlinear Optics Advisory Committee, and the Ultrafast Electronics and Optoelectronics Program Committee. He also was Chair of CLEO’s Fundamental Science Program Committee from 1985 through 1987, the Joint Council on Quantum Electronics from 1988 through 1993, the International Council on Quantum Electronics from 1992 to 1993, and the RW Wood Prize Committee in 1995. In addition to his volunteer positions at Optica, he served on the Oklahoma Chapter of the Nature Conservancy, the Ocean Conservancy and the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater, Inc.
Optica (formerly the Optical Society) named Grischkowsky a Fellow in 1988 “for his innovative contributions to laser science and for his leadership in optical pulse compression.” In 2003, he received the William F. Meggers Award “for seminal contributions to the development and application of THz time-domain spectroscopy.”
