Anthony E. Siegman

Who was Anthony E. Siegman?

Anthony E. Siegman, a widely known expert on lasers and optics, was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1931, and received an A.B. degree summa cum laude from Harvard College in 1952, an M.S. in Applied Physics from UCLA in 1954, and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 1957. He was appointed to the Stanford Electrical Engineering faculty in 1956, and retired from the McMurtry Professorship of Engineering at Stanford in November 1998 after more than four decades as a faculty member in Electrical Engineering and Applied Physics. Immediately following his retirement he served as president of the Optical Society of America for 1999-2000. At present he is engaged in technical writing and consulting and in serving as an expert witness in intellectual property and other litigation, as well as serving on advisory boards for a number of laser and fiber optic startup companies.

During his career Professor Siegman made many research contributions in microwave and quantum electronics, laser physics and devices, and laser applications and optics, including supervising some 40 PhD dissertations and publishing approximately 250 scientific articles. He wrote three texts on masers and lasers including the widely used reference and textbook LASERS (University Science Books, 1986). He was Director of the Edward L. Ginzton Laboratory at Stanford from 1978 to 1983, and spent sabbatical periods as Visiting Professor of Applied Physics at Harvard in 1965, Guggenheim Fellow at the IBM Research Labs in Zurich in 1969-70, and Humboldt Senior Scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany, in 1984-85.

He was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Engineering in 1973 and the National Academy of Sciences in 1988. He also received the R. W. Wood Prize and the Frederic Ives Medal of the Optical Society of America for overall excellence in optics in 1980 and 1987; the Quantum Electronics Award of IEEE LEOS in 1989; and the Arthur L. Schawlow Medal of the Laser Institute of America in 1991. During his career he also consulted for numerous companies and government agencies, and was a member of the U.S. Air Force Scientific Advisory Board from 1974 to 1980.

Updated June 2004