Lene Vestergaard Hau
(Physics)

In 1999 Danish scientist Lene Vestergaard Hau became one of the all-time most prominent women physicists when the journal Nature published a paper in which Hau and a team of physicists at the Rowland Institute for Science in Cambridge, Mass., described how they had sent a pulse of laser light into a tiny cloud of extremely cold gas and slowed the light to bicycle speed. Later, in 2001, they published -- also in Nature - how they had halted a light pulse, stored it for several milliseconds in a an atom cloud, and then subsequently let the light pulse loose and sent it back on its way.

Lene Vestergaard Hau accepted a two-year appointment as a postdoctoral fellow in Physics at Harvard University in 1989. She obtained her Ph.D. from the University of Aarhus in Denmark in 1991. Her formalised training is in theoretical physics but her interest moved to experimental research in an effort to create a new form of matter known as a Bose-Einstein condensate. In 1991 she joined the Rowland Institute for Science in Cambridge, Mass., as a scientific staff member. Since 1999 she has held the position of Gordon McKay Professor of Applied Physics and Professor of Physics at Harvard. In 2001 Lene Vestergaard Hau received the MacArthur "genius" award.

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