OSA Fellow Peter P Sorokin was born in 1931 in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. He attended Harvard University, ultimately earning a Ph.D. in 1958. The same year, he joined IBM, where he was working on developing the first laser. Theodore Maiman beat him for the official first laser, but Sorokin continued his work, and developed the second and third lasers using different materials. In 1964, his focus changed to organic dyes, and in 1966 he and John Lankard created the organic dye laser. His received many awards for his work including OSA’s R.W. Wood Prize in 1978, the Comstock Prize from the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Physical Society’s first Arthur L. Schawlow Prize in Laser Science.

He passed away in 2015.