Gérard Mourou
Gérard Albert Mourou is a French scientist and pioneer in the field of electrical engineering and lasers. He was awarded a Nobel Prize in Physics in 2018, along with Donna Strickland, for the invention of chirped pulse amplification, a technique later used to create ultrashort-pulse, very high-intensity laser pulses. In 1994, Mourou and his team at the University of Michigan discovered that the balance between the self-focusing refraction (Kerr effect) and self-attenuating diffraction by ionization and rarefaction of a laser beam of terawatt intensities in the atmosphere creates 'filaments' which act as waveguides for the beam thus preventing divergence. (Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%A9rard_Mourou)