Henry Kapteyn

Henry C. Kapteyn is a Professor of Physics and ECE at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and a fellow of JILA (a joint NIST/University of Colorado research institute). He has been at Colorado since 1999, with previous faculty positions at Washington State University and the University of Michigan. He received a BS from Harvey Mudd College in 1982, an MS from Princeton University in 1984, and a Ph.D. in Physics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1989. He and his wife and long-term collaborator, Margaret Murnane, are well known for their research in femtosecond lasers, and for understanding how to coherently upconvert this light to make a ‘tabletop x-ray laser’ that they have applied to pioneering studies of material behavior at short length- and time-scales. He has published more than 200 papers, was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2013, and is a fellow of the American Physical Society, the Optical Society of America, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. His awards include the Adolph Lomb Medal of the OSA in 1993, the Ahmed Zewail Award of the ACS in 2009, the R.W. Wood Prize of the OSA in 2010, the Arthur Schawlow Prize of the APS in 2010, and the Willis Lamb Award in Quantum Electronics in 2012.