Question: Eric Mazur left Europe to pursue a postdoctoral study with which Nobel laureate recognized for his work i ndeveloping driving principles behind nonlinear optics for laser spectroscopy?

Yuen-Ron Shen (沈元壤) is a professor emeritus of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, known for his work on non-linear optics.  He was born in Shanghai and graduated from National Taiwan University.  He received his Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Harvard under physicist and Nobel Laureate Nicolaas Bloembergen in 1963, and joined the department of physics at Berkeley in 1964.  In the early years, Dr. Shen was probably best known for his work on self-focusing and filament propagation of laser beams in materials.  These fundamental studies enabled the creation of ultrafast supercontinuum light sources.  In the 1970s and 1980s, he collaborated with Yuan T. Lee on the study of multiphoton dissociation of molecular clusters.  The molecular-beam photofragmentation translational spectroscopy that they developed has clarified much of the initial confusion concerning the dynamics of infrared multiphoton dissociation processes.  In the 1980s and 1990s, Professor Shen developed various nonlinear optics methods for the study of material surfaces and interfaces.  Among these techniques, second-harmonic generation and sum frequency generation spectroscopy are best known and now widely used by scientists from various fields.  He has collaborated with Gabor Somorjai on the use of the technique of Sum Frequency Generation Spectroscopy to study catalyst surfaces.  He is the author of the book "The Principles of Nonlinear Optics".  Professor Shen belongs to the prolific J. J. Thomson academic lineage tree.  Currently, Professor Shen works in U. C. Berkeley and Fudan University in Shanghai. <SEP>  He passed his "doctoraal examen" (equivalent to a master's degree) in 1977 and continued his graduate studies at the same institution.  In 1981 he obtained his Ph.D on a thesis entitled "The structure of non-equilibrium angular momentum polarizations in polyatomic gases". Mazur studied physics and astronomy at Leiden University.  Although he intended to go on to a career in industry with Philips N.V. in Eindhoven, he left Europe at the urging of his father, Peter Mazur, to pursue a postdoctoral study with recent Nobel laureate Nicolaas Bloembergen at Harvard University. <SEP> Chen Yung-Jui received his BS in Physics from National Tsing Hua University in 1969 and Ph.D. in Physics at the University of Pennsylvania (1976).  After a brief postdoctoral period at Penn, he joined the Advanced Microelectronic Laboratory at McDonnell Douglas Astronautics Co. in 1977.  From 1980 to 1987, Dr. Chen conducted fiber optical communications related research at GTE Laboratories.  During the ten years in industry, he worked on MOS/MNOS VLSI technology, wafer scale integration, Ultra-fast optical spectroscopy, nonlinear optics of semiconductors and organic polymers, integrated optics and optoelectronic devices.  In 1987, he moved to academe and became one of the founding faculty members of the Department of Electrical Engineering at University of Maryland, Baltimore County. <SEP> Nicolaas "Nico" Bloembergen (March 11, 1920 – September 5, 2017) was a Dutch-American physicist and Nobel laureate, recognized for his work in developing driving principles behind nonlinear optics for laser spectroscopy.  During his career, he was a professor at both Harvard University and later at the University of Arizona.