Rick Trebino
Events
Rick Trebino
Georgia Institute of Technology, USA
Short Pulse Lasers
About the Speaker
Rick Trebino was born in Boston on January 18, 1954. He was quite poor as a child, but, on scholarships, he earned his high-school degree from Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, his B.A. from Harvard in 1977, and his Ph.D. from Stanford in 1983. Shortly afterward, while at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, California, he invented Frequency-Resolved Optical Gating (FROG), the first technique for the complete measurement of an ultrashort laser pulse in time, solving this long-standing famous problem in the field of ultrafast optics and advancing pulse measurement from blurry black-and-white snapshots to high-resolution full-color displays. In 1998, he accepted a Chair at Georgia Tech, where he extended humankind’s measurement capability to the complete spatiotemporal electromagnetic field of even highly complex ultrashort pulses. He currently also develops more advanced approaches to optics and physics education, doing for lectures what Gutenberg did for books. He’s received numerous prestigious awards, including Optica’s 2024 R.W. Wood Prize. In addition, in 2022, ScholarGPs, an objective evaluator of all scientists, ranked him #1 of all approximately 19,000 scientists who work with ultrashort laser pulses in all three of its categories, quality, productivity, and impact. He has also received several awards for his pioneering contributions to optics and physics education, and he is a Fellow of four scientific societies. He freely provides his elegant, entertaining, and fully narrated multimedia entire-course video lectures to the world via his web site to encourage the creation of free high-quality video lectures in academia in general.
