Jaron E. Shrock has been named the 2025 recipient of the American Physical Society’s Marshall N. Rosenbluth Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Award. Shrock was cited for the first demonstration of multi-GeV laser wakefield acceleration using a plasma waveguide in an all-optical scheme.
After graduating from Swarthmore College in 2018, Jaron joined Distinguished University Professor Howard Milchberg’s Intense Laser Matter Interactions lab, where 
The accelerator in action. his research has focused on using lasers to accelerate electrons to multi-GeV energies over meter-scale distances. The laser intensities needed to do this are extremely high, and the key element that keeps them high is a plasma waveguide—first realized by Dr. Milchberg at the University of Maryland in the 1990’s. The plasma waveguide is analogous to a glass fiber optic cable, but it can confine laser intensities more than 7 orders of magnitude higher than would destroy the glass fiber. “Shrinking a km-long machine to fit inside a university lab, manufacturing facility, or hospital has enormous potential to bring advanced light and radiation sources to a variety of applications, and provides a possible path towards developing compact high energy colliders for probing fundamental physics”, said Shrock.
Dr. Shrock defended his thesis, Multi-GeV Laser Wakefield Acceleration in Optically Generated Plasma Waveguides, in 2023, and has also been recognized with the John Dawson Thesis Prize at the 2025 Laser Plasma Accelerators Workshop in Ischia, Italy. The success of the Maryland platform for laser acceleration has led to its installation for collaborative experiments at leading high power laser facilities in the US and Europe. Jaron is continuing his work at UMD as a postdoc, both helping to install the UMD platform at the other facilities and doing experiments on UMd’s new 100 terawatt laser system. In thinking about the future of this research, Jaron says “It’s been thrilling (and exhausting!) to see this platform grow from ideas developed by our small team to the centerpiece of international research efforts, and I believe we’re only scratching the surface of what these accelerators can do.”
Shrock (right) with Ela Rockafellow (left) installing a prototype 1 meter gas jet on the ALEPH laser system at Colorado State University.Jaron is the fourth of Milchberg’s students to win the award, joining Thomas Clark (1999), Ki-Yong Kim (2004) and Yu-Hsin Chen (2012).
“Congratulations to Jaron for this outstanding achievement,” said physics chair Steve Rolston. “And kudos to Howard Milchberg for establishing such a constructive and creative atmosphere.”
The award consists of $2,000, a certificate, and an invitation to speak at the November 2025 Meeting of the APS Division of Plasma Physics (DPP) in Long Beach, California.