Charles Hard Townes

Charles Hard Townes (July 28, 1915 – January 27, 2015) was an American Nobel Prize-winning physicist^[1] and educator.

Charles Hard Townes
Townes in 2007
Born	(1915-07-28)July 28, 1915 Greenville, South Carolina
Died	January 27, 2015(2015-01-27) (aged 99) Oakland, California
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Furman University (B.S. & B.A.) Duke University (M.A.) Caltech (Ph.D.)
Known for	Inventing the Maser
Awards	Comstock Prize in Physics (1958) Young Medal and Prize (1963) Nobel Prize in Physics (1964) IEEE Medal of Honor (1967) National Medal of Science (1982) Lomonosov Gold Medal (2000) Vannevar Bush Award (2006) SPIE Gold Medal (2010)
Scientific career
Fields	Physics
Institutions	Berkeley Bell Labs Institute for Defense Analyses Columbia MIT University Of Michigan
Doctoral advisor	William Smythe
Doctoral students	Ali Javan James P. Gordon Robert Boyd Raymond Y. Chiao

Townes is known for his work on the theory and application of the maser, on which he got the fundamental patent, and other work in quantum electronics connected with both maser and laser devices.

He shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1964 with Nikolay Basov and Alexander Prokhorov. In 1982, Townes received the National Medal of Science, presented by President Ronald Reagan. In 1999, he was elected a foreign member of the Academia Europaea.^[2]

Townes was born in Greenville, South Carolina. Townes died at the age of 99 in Oakland, California, on January 27, 2015.^[3]