Shaul Mukamel, a Distinguished Professor of Chemistry and of Physics and Astronomy at the University of California, Irvine, had received his Ph.D. in 1976 from Tel Aviv University and held faculty positions at Rice University, the Weizmann Institute, and the University of Rochester He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the Optical Society of America and an elected member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences. He is a Fellow of OSA and recipient of the 2003 Ellis R. Lippincott and 2017 William F. Meggers Awards.

Mukamel had pioneered the development of coherent ultrafast multidimensional spectroscopy techniques which span the infrared to the x-ray spectral regimes. His theoretical framework based on "Liouville space pathways" and his textbook "Principles of Nonlinear Optical Spectroscopy (1995) had created a unified approach for the design and interpretation of these signals. Recent effort includes broadband stimulated Raman and diffraction of x-rays, nonlinear spectroscopy with quantum light and entangled photons, and molecular polaritons in microcavities.