Alexander Gaeta received his Ph.D. in 1991 in Optics from the University of Rochester. He is the David M. Rickey Professor in the Department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics at Columbia University. He was on the faculty of the School of Applied and Engineering at Cornell University from 1992-2015 and served as its Director from 2012-2014. He has published more than 230 papers in quantum and nonlinear optics. He is the founding Editor-in-Chief of Optica and is a Fellow of the OSA, APS, and IEEE. He holds 10 patents and co-founded PicoLuz, Inc. He received the 2019 Charles Hard Towes Medal from OSA “for seminal contributions to chip-based nonlinear photonics, nonlinear optics in photonic crystal fibers, and nonlinear propagation of ultrashort laser pulses.”

Gaeta has made pioneering contributions to the fields of quantum and nonlinear photonics. These include key advances to nonlinear wave propagation that provided critical understanding to self-focusing and filamentation of ultrashort laser pulses, the generation of slow light via stimulated scattering, and nonlinear processes in photonic crystal fibers.  He and his group have also performed seminal research in nonlinear nanophotonics that enabled photonic-chip dispersion engineering, optical frequency combs, generation of quantum states of light, and all-optical signal processing.