Margaret Murnane, a professor of physics at the University of Colorado at Boulder, is the winner of a $500,000 MacArthur Fellowship sometimes known as the "genius grant."
She is the fourth CU-Boulder faculty member to receive the prestigious award from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation of Chicago. Murnane was one of 25 recipients of this year's awards.
Murnane, 41, and her husband, Professor Henry Kapteyn, are world leaders in the field of experimental ultrafast optical science. Their recent work in extending ultrafast light pulses into the deep ultraviolet and soft X-ray region is envisaged to have a wide variety of applications in chemical and plasma physics, and possibly in integrated circuit manufacture and biological imaging.
The two physics professors work together as a team and also are fellows of JILA, a joint institute of CU-Boulder and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. They joined the CU-Boulder physics department as tenured professors in August 1999.
"We are very proud that one of our faculty members has won this award," said Peter Spear, dean of the CU-Boulder College of Arts and Sciences, the home college of the physics department.
"Not only is it an honor for Margaret, it reflects on the outstanding quality of our physics department. The award also reflects on the excellent education our students receive. Professor Murnane brings her world-class research into the classroom, where she teaches freshman physics as well as other undergraduate and graduate courses."
This spring, Murnane taught a course called "Light and Color" to 70 nonscience CU-Boulder students. In fall 1999, she taught a freshman introductory physics laboratory course.
Murnane is considered one of the elite women physicists in the United States. She received worldwide recognition for winning the Maria Goeppert-Mayer Award, given each year to the top woman physicist under the age of 40.
Her other honors include the American Physical Society聮s Simon Ramo Plasma Physics Prize, a Presidential Young Investigator Award, a Sloan Foundation Fellowship and a Presidential Faculty Fellowship. She is a fellow of the Optical Society of America and vice-chair of the National Research Council committee on atomic, molecular and optical sciences.
The $500,000 MacArthur Fellowship is provided over five years and may be spent any way the winner chooses.
"Receiving the MacArthur award is a tremendous honor for Margaret and the university" said Professor John Cumalat, chair of the CU physics department. "It also marks a recognition that the work of Margaret and Henry may have wide ranging applications in the future."
Murnane and Kapteyn previously worked at the Center for Ultrafast Optical Sciences at the University of Michigan. The experimental research physicists earned their doctorates at the University of California, Berkeley, and also taught physics at Washington State University. They also launched Kapteyn-Murnane Laboratories, which manufactures ultrafast laser instrumentation.
CU-Boulder聮s Ph.D. program in atomic and molecular physics was ranked fourth in the nation in 1999 by U.S. News and World Report.
Three other CU-Boulder faculty members have received MacArthur Fellowships since the program began in 1981. They are David Hawkins of philosophy in 1981, Charles Archambeau of physics in 1988 and Patricia Limerick of history in 1995.