Professor Gérard Albert Mourou is a French scientist and pioneer in the field of electrical engineering and lasers. He is a professor and member of Haut Collège at the École Polytechnique, and A. D. Moore Distinguished University Professor Emeritus at the University of Michigan. He is the winner of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work with his doctoral student, Donna Strickland, on generating ultrashort high-intensity laser pulses without destroying the amplifying material.

Professor Mourou has made numerous contributions to the fields of ultrafast lasers, high-speed electronics, and medicine. He has been honored with several notable awards for his breakthrough scientific inventions, including Charles Hard Townes Award by the OSA (2009), and Arthur L. Schawlow Prize in Laser Science by the American Physical Society (2018). Professor Mourou was the founding director of the Center for Ultrafast Optical Science at the University of Michigan in 1990. He was director of the Laboratoire d’optique appliquée at the ENSTA from 2005 to 2009.

Professor Mourou studied physics at the University of Grenoble, and then at the Université Pierre-et-Marie-Curie in Paris, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1973. He later moved to the United States and became a professor at the University of Rochester and University of Michigan Ann Arbor, where he did his Nobel Prize awarded work.