Pierre Meystre earned his Ph.D. in 1974 from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne, Switzerland. He went on to earn his Habilitation from Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich in 1983. Today, he holds a joint professorship at the University of Arizona, as Regents’ Professor of Physics and Regent’s Professor Emeritus of Optical Sciences. He is also the Director of the Biosphere 2 Institute.

In 2002, he received OSA’s R. W. Wood Prize “for seminal contributions to free-electron laser, cavity QUED, and micromaser; and most recently, the “invention” of the new field of nonlinear atom optics.”