Boris P Stoicheff

Boris P. Stoicheff (June 1, 1924 – April 15, 2010) was a Macedonian Canadian physicist.

Stoicheff was born in Bitola, in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia (now Macedonia). He emigrated with his family to Canada as a young child in 1931, and grew up in Toronto. He earned a degree in Engineering Physics from the University of Toronto in 1947, and a PhD from the same institution in 1950. He stayed for another year at Toronto on a fellowship, then went to the University of Ottawa to work as a postdoctoral researcher in a lab headed by Gerhard Herzberg, where he worked on Raman scattering.

Stoicheff became well known for his Raman spectroscopy through the 1950s, publishing a number of previously unavailable high-resolution molecular spectra. In 1953 he was promoted to a permanent research position with assistants. In 1954 he married his wife Joan, and they had a son, Peter Stoicheff, in 1956 (who would go on to become the President of the University of Saskatchewan). In the late 1950s, he became interested in Brillouin scattering, and attempted to build a laser, though Theodore Maiman succeeded in doing so first. Stoicheff nonetheless soon built the first laser in Canada, and researched using it for spectroscopy. He spent a sabbatical year in 1963 at MIT, working with Charles Townes and some of Townes's graduate students on the same subject, and in 1964 took a professorship at the University of Toronto.

He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1975 and served as president of the Optical Society of America in 1976 and was awarded the Frederic Ives Medal in 1983. In the late 1970s he changed focus from Brillouin spectroscopy to Rydberg spectroscopy. He retired in 1989, though continued to perform research. By 2000, he was working on the origin of diffuse interstellar bands.

Stoicheff died in Toronto on April 15, 2010.