Martin Richardson elected Fellow of AAAS

University Trustee Chair and Pegasus Professor, Martin Richardson, professor of Optics, Physics and ECE, has just been elected to the rank of Fellow in the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world’s largest general scientific society. For this award, he is cited, “for distinguished contributions to the development of high power pulsed lasers, and for their use in understanding the science of high power laser light interaction with matter, particularly laser-induced plasmas”. A long-time member of AAAS, he joins some six other UCF Engineering faculty elected to this rank. Dr Richardson joined UCF as a full professor in 1990, after career positions at the University of Rochester and the National Research Council in Ottawa, Canada, and visiting positions in France, Germany, LBNL, the UK, Japan, Australia, Qatar and the Soviet Union. He graduated in laser science from Imperial College and the University of London. At UCF he co-founded with William Silfvast (now retired), the Laser Plasma Laboratory in the newly created CREOL optics center. This laboratory has now become one of the nation’s largest academic research groups in laser science and technology, graduating over 60 Ph.D and MS students since 1990, with ~ 250 scientific publications. Most of his former students hold positions in U.S. industry, government or academic institutions. He has generated more than $40M of research funding at UCF from multiple research agencies, plus a $24M donation of equipment, cash and IP from the Northrop Grumman Corp, and has been a member of UCF Millionaires Club since 2005. In 2007 he founded the Townes Laser Institute at UCF, named after Charles Townes the 1964 Nobel Laureate inventor of the concept of the laser. Dr Richardson is a fellow of several professional societies (OSA, SPIE, JSPS, APS, IEEE, IOP), is a receipt of the Schardin Medal and the Harold E.Edgerton Award, and was made “Docteur Honoris Causa” at the University of Bordeaux in 2013. In 2014-2015 he was a Jefferson Science Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences at the U.S. Department of State in Washington D.C.