Margaret Murnane

Born on 23 January 1959 in Limerick, Ireland, Margaret Murnane is an optical physicist at JILA and the University of Colorado in Boulder. She earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University College Cork in Ireland and a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. For her doctoral thesis, Murnane built a laser that produced pulses as short as 100 femtoseconds (10^-13 s) in duration. Since 1990 Murnane has run an optics lab with her husband, physicist Henry Kapteyn, and pushed the limits of focusing light. Her team optimized a sapphire-doped titanium crystal design to build ultrafast lasers with sub-10 fs pulses. She has also pioneered efforts to generate laserlike pulses of x rays, which enable analysis of chemical and biological specimens. Murnane is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and won a MacArthur Fellowship in 2000. (Photo credit: Glenn Asakawa/University of Colorado)

Date in History: 23 January 1959