Prof. Y.R. Shen of UC Berkeley in DICP

On June 16, Prof. Y.R. Shen of UC Berkeley, USA, was invited to deliver a Memorial Lecture on the 60th Anniversay of DICP. The title of his lecture was "Vibrational Spectroscopic Studies of Water Interfaces". This was the 7th invited Memorial Lecture for the cerebration of the 60th anniversary of the founding of DICP.

Prof. Shen's lecturing session was presided over by Prof. YANG Xueming, Assistant to the Director of DICP and Director of the State Key Laboratory of Molecular Dynamics of DICP. About 80 DICP scientists and graduate students attended the lecture. After the lecture, Prof. Shen was bestowed upon an Honorary Certificate for the Memorial Lecture on behalf of DICP by Prof. ZHANG Tao, Director of DICP.

Prof. Shen has been a professor of condensed-state experimental physics at UC Berkely. He is at present members of the National Academy of Science, USA, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Academia Sinica, Taiwan, and Chinese Academy of Sciences. He has been engaging in studies of non-linear optics, laser spectrometry, surface science and condensed-state physics for many years.

He is regarded as a path-breaker in the researches of liquid crystal non-linear optics and surface non-linear optics. He has made outstanding contributions in the studies of optical non-linearity of plasmas, multi-photon dissociation of molecules, as well as atomic and molecular laser spectrometry. He is an internationally prominent scholar, with a great number of publications, and winner of many honorary awards.

Ever since his first visit to China in 1972, he has been very initiative in the sparkpluging of academic exchanges among Chinese universities and institutions. The China National Symposium on Laser Physics was first sponsored by him in 1980, and 14 symposia have been held in a time span of 30 years after the first symposium opened in Qingdao of the Shantong Province.

This series of symposia have played an important role in promoting the development and elite nurturing in the field of laser physics of our country. Owing to his brilliant contributions in helping Chinese scientific research to go out to the world, he was granted the CAS Award of International Science & Technology Cooperation in 2008.