Peter F Moulton is a member of the Senior Staff in the Laser Applications and Applications Group at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory in Lexington, MA. He received an A.B. in Physics from Harvard College in 1968 and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from MIT in 1972 and 1975 respectively. After graduate school he worked in the Quantum Electronics Group at Lincoln Laboratory. In 1985 he helped to found Schwartz Electro-Optics, where he managed the Research Division and worked to spin that out a separate company, Q-Peak, now part of Physical Sciences. He rejoined Lincoln Laboratory in 2015. Moulton's technical work began in the field of bulk solid state lasers, later extended to include nonlinear optics and fiber lasers. At Lincoln Laboratory in 1982, he invented the Ti:sapphire laser, and he has also made important advances in high-power diode-pumped solid state lasers, parametric oscillators, and long-wavelength bulk and fiber lasers.

He is a Fellow of OSA and recipient of the 1997 R. W. Wood Prize “for the invention of the Ti:sapphire near-infrared laser, which enabled a new era in tunable solid-state lasers and made possible all-solid-state ultra short sources.”