In this installment of Senior Member Insights, OPN talks with Nicolaie Pavel, a senior researcher at the National Institute for Laser, Plasma, and Radiation Physics, Magurele, Romania, since 1990. Pavel graduated in July 1990 from the Faculty of Physics, University of Bucharest, Romania. In 1997, he received a Ph.D. in optics, spectroscopy and lasers from the Institute of Atomic Physics, Bucharest; he habilitated in 2013.

Pavel has experience designing various diode-pumped solid-state lasers, in areas including Nd-vanadate microchip lasers; Nd-based lasers pumped directly into the emitting level; obtaining buried, depressed-cladding waveguide lasers using a direct fs-pulse laser-writing technique; and high-peak-power passively Q-switched Nd:YAG/Cr4+:YAG lasers, with applications in laser ignition for passenger-car gasoline engines. Pavel is a member of Optica and SPIE. Since July 2020, he has been an associate editor of the Optics Express journal.
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