Margaret M. Murnane

Margaret Murnane received her BS and MS degrees from University College Cork, Ireland, and her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, USA. She has been on the faculty of Washington State University and the University of Michigan. She is now a Fellow at JILA and a member of the Department of Physics and Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Colorado. She runs a trans-disciplinary research group with Henry Kapteyn. She and Kapteyn also co-founded KMLabs, the first laser company to commercially offer 10fs Ti:sapphire lasers as well as coherent high-harmonic systems.

She has been an international leader in the field of ultrafast optical and x-ray science for over 25 years, pioneering the development of ultrashort-pulse femtosecond lasers, the development of methods for efficiently generating soft x-ray high-harmonics, and the use of these x-rays to probe the attosecond time-scale response of atoms, molecules, and surfaces. Her influential work has been cited more than 13,750 times.

She has served Optica in numerous roles, including editorial positions (Optics Letters), program committees (CLEO, FiO, Ultrafast Phenomena), the Optica Board of Directors, Strategic Planning Council, Topical Meeting RAC, Joint Council on Quantum Electronics, and the Selection Committees for multiple awards.

Murnane is a Fellow of Optica, the American Physical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Association for Women in Science. Her many awards and honors include the Maria Goeppert-Mayer Award of the American Physical Society, the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Physics, and Optica’s R. W. Wood Prize. She is a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellow, was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, and is the first woman to receive Optica’s highest honor, the Frederic Ives Medal/Jarus W. Quinn Prize. In 2026, she was elected an Honorary Member of Optica.