The 2026 Willis E. Lamb Award

Professor Miles received his B.S. in 1966, M.S. and 1967, and Ph.D. in 1972 all from Stanford University. He joined the faculty at Princeton University in the Fall of 1972. From 1980 to 1996 he served as Chairman of Engineering Physics. He became Emeritus at Princeton in 2013 and joined Texas A&M University in February 2017. His expertise is on the development of methods based on atomic and molecular quantum states driven by linear and nonlinear optical interactions to control, accelerate, measure, extract power and precondition air and other gas mixtures for subsonic, supersonic and hypersonic fluid dynamics, standoff molecular detection, directed energy, and propulsion applications. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, a Fellow of Optica (previously the Optical Society of America), a Fellow of the Hertz Foundation, a Fellow of the American Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA),  and a member of the Texas Academy of Medicine, Engineering Science and Technology (TAMEST).  He was the recipient of the AIAA Aerodynamics Measurement Award in 2000, the AIAA Plasma Dynamics and Lasers Award in 2012 and the US Air Force Commander’s Public Service Award in 2015.  He is a member of the Board of Directors of the Hertz Foundation, the Board of Trustees of Pacific University (Oregon), the AIAA Plasma Dynamics and Lasers Technical Committee, and a representative for the AIAA on the Elmer A. Sperry Board of Award. He is currently University Distinguished Professor and O’Donnell Foundation Chair in Aerospace Engineering at Texas A&M and Robert Porter Patterson Professor Emeritus and Senior Scholar in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Princeton. He is the Director of the Aerospace Laboratory for Lasers, ElectroMagnetics and Optics (ALLEMO) at Texas A&M University.