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2025 William F. Meggers Award Winner

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Optica Names John Doyle the 2025 William F. Meggers Award Recipient

Optica is pleased to announce that John Doyle, Harvard University, USA, has been selected as the 2025 recipient of the William F. Meggers Award. Doyle is honored for developing pioneering methods enabling a broad range of spectroscopic studies, including cryogenic cooling of large molecules and radicals, novel probes of chirality, slow molecular beams, and laser cooling of large molecules.

Doyle received his bachelor’s degree and PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). After being a postdoc at MIT, he joined Harvard University where he is currently Henry B. Silsbee Professor of Physics.

Doyle's research centers on using cold molecules for science, including particle physics, collisions, and quantum information. Starting with the development of a new technique for producing heavy, polar radical molecules in an intense cold beam, he launched, with collaborators, searches for physics beyond the Standard Model (BSM) through probing for the electron electric dipole moment. His group is a pioneer in the cooling and trapping of molecules, studying collisional processes in atoms and molecules and developing tools to achieve full quantum control over increasingly complex molecular systems. They pioneered the laser cooling of polyatomic molecules and are working to realize new techniques to trap and study interactions in polyatomic molecules.

Doyle is director of the Japan Undergraduate Research Exchange Program (JUREP) and is a co-founder of both the Harvard Quantum Initiative and the Harvard/MIT Center for Ultracold Atoms, serving as co-director of each for seven and twenty years, respectively. He has published papers in the areas of ultracold atoms, molecules, spectroscopy, precision measurement, ultracold neutrons, respiratory disease transmission mitigation, and dark matter detection as well as supervised the PhDs of over thirty students. He is a Humboldt, Fulbright, and American Physical Society (APS) Fellow, and winner of the APS Ramsey and Broida prizes. He is the 2025 APS President.

Established in 1970, the Meggers Award is presented for outstanding work in spectroscopy. It honors William F. Meggers for his notable contributions to the field of spectroscopy and metrology, and was endowed by the family of William F. Meggers, several individuals and a number of optical manufacturers.

About Optica

Optica, Advancing Optics and Photonics Worldwide, is the society dedicated to promoting the generation, application, archiving and dissemination of knowledge in the field. Founded in 1916, it is the leading organization for scientists, engineers, business professionals, students and others interested in the science of light. Optica's renowned publications, meetings, online resources and in-person activities fuel discoveries, shape real-life applications and accelerate scientific, technical and educational achievement.

 

Photo Credit: Josh Reynolds For Harvard

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