In 1997, Bob Kranz and John Scales wrote their first proposal for hardware at Colorado School of Mines (CSM). They got a big boost when the Army Research Office funded this proposal the next year and bought the first lasers. The PAL name didn’t appear until about a year or two later. As John’s PhD student, kasper van Wijk performed some of the first measurements in the lab in 1998.
Since then, Kasper graduated, was a postdoc and research professor at CSM. In 2006, John Scales moved to the Physics department to run the Mesoscopic Physics Laboratory, and Kasper took a faculty position in the department of Geosciences at Boise State University, where he continued running the Physical Acoustics Laboratory from 2006-2012. Now, Kasper and the Physical Acoustics Lab call The department of Physics at the University of Auckland their home.