In 1969 he earned a Ph.D. in physics from Washington University in St. Louis, under the mentorship of E. T. Jaynes, with the thesis titled Quantum and Semiclassical Radiation Theory.

This first observation of the Mollow sidebands in resonance fluorescence was fundamental to understanding of the nature of quantum correlations in a coherently pumped two-level system.

[4] These pioneering experimental studies were accompanied by theoretical papers providing the underpinning concepts and models, and introducing much of the standard terminology of the fields, including “lambda”, “v”, and “cascade” for describing three-level configurations, “coherent population trapping” as well as introducing, with Cohen-Tannoudji, the dressed-state basis for resonance fluorescence and Autler-Townes studies.

In a series of some 50 papers from the early 1980s well into the 2000s, Stroud’s group studied the production and evolution of spatially localized electron wave packets made up of superpositions of Rydberg atomic states.

By the application of Stark fields and THz half-cycle pulses, the electrons could even be made to oscillate, while localized along a linear orbit some 1000 Angstroms in length.