Craig Siders

Craig W. Siders received the B.A. (summa cum laude graduate) degree in physics from Kenyon College, Gambier, OH, in 1988, and the Ph.D. degree in physics from the University of Texas at Austin, Austin, in 1996. He was a Director Funded Postdoctoral Fellow in the Material Science and Technology Division of Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he developed new pulse measurement tools for studying ultrafast ionization dynamics in gases and utilized novel pulse shaping methods to alleviate saturation effects in large-aperture photoconductive terahertz antennae. As a Project Scientist and later the Director of X-ray sciences in Kent Wilson's Group at the University of California, San Diego, he and the X-ray team performed groundbreaking ultrafast X-ray diffraction experiments [Nature 398, 310 (1999); Science 286, 1340 (1999); PRL 85, 586 (2000); PRB 63, 193306 (2001)], including the first direct observation of ultrafast nonthermal melting in short-pulse irradiated semiconductors. As a faculty member in the College of Optics and Photonics/Center for Research and Education in Optics and Lasers (CREOL) and Physics Department at the University of Central Florida, he was engaged in applications of compact high-average power femtosecond lasers, cofounding a start-up company Raydiance in Orlando. In 2005, he joined the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), Livermore, CA, where he became the Program Element Leader in Advanced Radiographic and Energetic Systems, with primary project focus on developing advanced petawatt (PW) laser drive radiography diagnostics for ignition targets, and on advanced linac-based Compton scattering sources of monoenergetic megaelectronvolt (MeV) scale gamma ray beams.