Mark George Raizen is an American physicist who conducts experiments on quantum optics and atom optics. Early life and education Raizen was born in New York City. Raizen's uncle, Dr. Robert F. Goldberger, was provost of Columbia University and deputy director for science at the NIH. Raizen attended The Walden School on the Upper West Side, until his family moved to Israel. He graduated from De Shalit High School and received his undergraduate degree in mathematics from Tel Aviv University in 1980. He continued his graduate education at the University of Texas at Austin, under the guidance of Steven Weinberg (Nobel Prize in Physics, 1979) and Jeff Kimble (California Institute of Technology). Raizen completed his Ph.D. in 1989. From 1989 to 1991, Raizen was a National Research Council (NRC) post-doc at the Time and Frequency Division of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, working with David Wineland, (Nobel Prize in Physics, 2012). Academic career In 1991, Raizen returned to Austin and The University of Texas where he became an assistant professor of physics. He was promoted to associate professor in 1996 and full professor in 2000. Raizen holds the Sid W. Richardson Foundation Regents Chair in physics. In September, 2017, Raizen assumed a joint appointment as a professor in the Department of Pediatrics at the Dell Medical School. Scientific career Raizen started his scientific career in theoretical particle physics in 1984 with Steven Weinberg. In 1985, Raizen moved into experimental physics where he began his work with Jeff Kimble. In his graduate work, Raizen was instrumental in one of the first experiments that measured Squeezed states of light and also observed the Vacuum Rabi splitting in the optical domain. While at NIST, Raizen developed a miniature linear ion trap which has become the basis for quantum information with trapped ions. At the University of Texas, Austin, the research program in the Raizen Group uses laser cooling and trapping of neutral atoms to study fundamental problems. They observed dynamical localization in the momentum of atoms, the quantum suppression of chaos. In other experiments, Raizen and his group investigated quantum transport of atoms in an accelerating optical lattice. They studied the loss mechanism during the acceleration due to quantum tunneling. For short times, they found a deviation from the exponential decay law in the survival probability. This short-time deviation from exponential decay was then used to suppress or enhance the decay