The 2008 Willis E. Lamb Award for Laser Science and Quantum Optics

Awarded January 9, 2008, at the 38th Winter Colloquium on the Physics of Quantum Electronics.

Gershon Kurizki, The Weizmann Institute

For his contributions to the theory of short-time quantum decay and decoherence and their dynamical control.

Gershon Kurizki was born in Vilnius, Lithuania, in 1952. He immigrated to Israel with his parents at the age of 6. He was married in 1977 to Zipora, and has two sons: Naham and Yodan.

He received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. in physics from the Technion in 1979, while in the military (discharged as Major). He then pursued his Ph.D. studies in quantum optics from 1980 to 1983 at the University of New Mexico under the supervision of J. K. McIver and M. O. Scully. After 2 years as Lecturer in Tel Aviv University he joined in 1985 the staff of the Chemical Physics Department at the Weizmann Institute of Science where he is currently Professor. He was tenured in 1990, and has held the G. H. Dunne Professorial Chair in Quantum Optics since 1997. He is a Fellow of the OSA, the APS, and the British Institute of Physics. At the time of this writing, he had coauthored over 180 scientific publications, including over 35 in PRL and Nature. He has mostly been active in quantum optics, laser physics, quantum measurement theory, and quantum information.

His extracurricular activities include regular publication of poems and philosophical essays in the foremost Israeli periodical Keshet.

Bio provided by Prof. Kurizki, 2007.