Ronnie Shepherd

Dr. Shepherd received his B.S.E. (’81), M.S.E. (’84), and Ph. D. (’87) from the University of Michigan, Department of Nuclear Engineering and Radiological Sciences (NERS)/Plasma Physics. His Ph. D. research was performed at Los Alamos National Lab on transport properties of strongly coupled plasma under the academic supervision of Professor Ronald Gilgenbach and the research supervision of Dr. Don Kania and Dr. Larry Jones. After completing his Ph.D., Dr. Shepherd joined Lawrence Livermore National Lab as a post-doctoral researcher studying spectroscopic characterization of high temperature, high density plasma, short pulse laser driven recombination x-ray lasers, and high temperature, high density plasma generation using ultrashort pulse lasers. Dr. Shepherd has received the NERS alumni achievement award (2018), was the co-recipient of the LLNL Director’s Science and Technology award for the Cimarron Project, and was a visiting scholar at Ecole Polytechnique Laboratoire D’Utilisation des Lasers Intenses (LULI) in 2007 and 2014.   He has author or co-authored over 130 publications. He is also an APS Fellow.

Featured publications:

1. S. Jiang, A. E. Lazicki, S. B. Hansen, P. A. Sterne, P. Grabowski, R. Shepherd, H. A. Scott, R. F. Smith, J. H. Eggert, and Y. Ping, “ Measurements of pressure-induced Kβ line shifts in ramp compressed cobalt up to 8 Mbar”. Phys. Rev. E 101, 023204.
2. A. McKelvey, G. E. Kemp, P. A. Sterne, A. Fernandez-Panella, R. Shepherd, M. Marinak, A. Link, G. W. Collins, H. Sio, J. King, R. R. Freeman, R. Hua, C. McGuffey, J. Kim, F. N. Beg, and Y. Ping, “Thermal conductivity measurements of proton-heated warm dense aluminum”. Scientific Reports, 2017; 7, 7015 (2017).
3. Y. Ping, R. Shepherd, B. F. Lasinski, M. Tabak, H. Chen, H. K. Chung, K. B. Fournier, S. B. Hansen, A. Kemp, D. A. Liedahl, K. Widmann, S. C. Wilks, W. Rozmus, and M. Sherlock, “Absorption of short laser pulses on solid targets in the ultra-relativistic regime”, Phys. Rev. Lett. 100, 085004 (2008).
4. P. Audebert, R. Shepherd, et. al., “Heating of Thin Foils with a Relativistic-Intensity Short-Pulse Laser", Phys. Rev. Lett., 89, 265001 (2002).