Dr. Milder is a scientist in the laser-plasma interactions group at University of Rochester’s Laboratory for Laser Energetics (LLE). He received a B.S. in Physics and Math from University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2015. His undergraduate research focus was single photon confocal microscopy for studying attoliter water droplets and biological molecules. Dr. Milder received his M.S. and Ph.D. in Plasma Physics from the University of Rochester, completing his Ph.D. in 2021. His Ph.D. research was focus on measuring kinetic effects in laser-produced plasma using optical Thomson scattering. As part of his thesis, he developed a method for extracting the electron velocity distribution, which contains the kinetic information about the electrons, from Thomson scattering. After finishing his Ph.D., he spent two years at the University of Alberta in Edmonton primarily working on ponderomotive effects in laser-produced plasmas.
As a scientist at the LLE Dr. Milder continues experimental work on fundamental plasma physics. Studying how kinetics impact hydrodynamic properties in plasmas, how ionization impacts the kinetics and heating of plasmas, and how ponderomotive forces enhance instabilities and redirect laser beams. He has a particular interest in the continued development of optical Thomson scattering, developing open-source machine-learning based analysis routines that enable more information to be extracted from data.
