You know, I don’t think I ever met Mourou either. I certainly heard people talk about him. But he was in the electrical engineering department (that’s where all the really high-power laser stuff was), and at Michigan that’s a separate campus a couple miles from the liberal arts campus where the physics building is. Even though I was involved in lasers and he was involved in lasers there wasn’t that much cross-communication between engineering and physics. Anyway, I remember people being disappointed when he left to pursue a better offer at the very end of his career--rather than retiring here, where he was head of a huge project--when I was pretty early on in grad school. (Looking it up, I was only in like my first or second year when he left, so maybe that’s really why I never met him.)
