Trustees Emeriti
Charles Townes
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Charles Townes
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A native of Greenville and a 1935 graduate of Furman with degrees in modern languages and physics, Charles Townes went on to earn a master’s degree from Duke University and a Ph.D. from California Institute of Technology. Charles joined the technical staff of Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1939 and remained there until 1948, when he joined the faculty of Columbia University. He was named vice president and director of research for the Institute for Defense Analysis in Washington, D.C., in 1958, and was appointed provost and professor of physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1961. In 1967 he was appointed to a professorship at the University of California at Berkeley, where he now holds the rank of University Professor Physics in the Graduate School.
In 1964, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his contributions to the development of the laser and maser. He is a member of the National Inventors Hall of Fame, and Townes Auditorium in Plyler Hall of Science at Furman is named in his honor. He is a charter member of the Furman Hall of Fame.
He holds a number of honorary degrees (Furman honored him in 1960) and has received a host of prestigious awards, among them NASA’s Distinguished Public Service Medal, the National Academy of Sciences’ Comstock Prize, and the National Medal of Science, the nation’s highest scientific award. In 1999 he was included in 1,000 Years, 1,000 People: Ranking the Men and Women Who Shaped the Millennium, a book that delineated the most important, influential and intriguing people of the last 1,000 years.Townes received the Templeton Prize in 2005 for contributions to the relation between science and religion.
Charles and his wife, Frances, have four daughters.
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