Laser Spectroscopy VII.

Yuen Ron Shen received his BS degree from the National Taiwan University in 1956 and his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1963 under the supervision of Nicolaas Bloembergen. After a year of postdoctoral work at Harvard, he was appointed to the Physics faculty of the University of California at Berkeley where he has been ever since. He has also been associated with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory since 1966. Shen's research interest is in the broad area of interaction of light with matter. He was involved in the early development of nonlinear optics, searching for basic understanding of various nonlinear optical phenomena. He is the author of the widely used text "The Principles of Nonlinear Optics". He contributed to the early accurate determination of band structures of semiconductors by developing a high-resolution wavelength-modulation spectroscopic technique. He initiated the field of nonlinear optics in liquid crystals and applications of nonlinear optics to characterization of liquid crystals. He pioneered the development of optical second harmonic generation and sum-frequency generation as powerful spectroscopic tools for surface and interface studies and their applications to many neglected, but important, areas of surface science. More recently, he has devoted himself to the development of sum-frequency generation as a novel sensitive probe for molecular chirality. Shen has received numerous prestigious awards including the 1986 Charles H. Townes Award of the OSA, the 1992 Arthur L. Schawlow Prize and the 1998 Frank Isakson Prize of the APS, and the 1996 Max-Planck Research Award. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, and the Academia Sinica. He is also a foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.