Physicist Marlan Scully Awarded Honor from Leading Optical Society
COLLEGE STATION —
Texas A&M University physicist and Texas Engineering Experiment Station researcher Dr. Marlan O. Scully has won the 1998 Charles H. Townes Award from the most prestigious society in the optics and photonics field for his work in quantum electronics.
Scully, a distinguished professor in the university’s physics department who also holds a joint appointment in the electrical engineering department in the Dwight Look College of Engineering, is director of Texas A&M’s Center for Theoretical Physics.
He received the award May 4 in California at the joint Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics (CLEO’98) and the International Quantum Electronics Conference (IQEC’98), the world’s most important conference and exhibit on lasers and electro-optics.
The Townes award is named for physics Nobel Laureate Charles H. Townes, the inventor of the maser/laser and a member of the Science Hall of Fame. The award is presented by the Optical Society of America (OSA), an 80-year-old society promoting the importance of optics applications. It’s given to an individual or group for outstanding experimental or theoretical work, discovery, or invention in the field of quantum electronics.
Scully has been at Texas A&M since 1992 after serving on faculties of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Arizona and University of New Mexico. He has served as co-director of the Texas Laser Laboratory at the Houston Advanced Research Center in The Woodlands. His major research interests include quantum optics, laser physics, foundations of quantum mechanics, non-equilibrium statistical mechanics and bioengineering.
He is the author of more than 300 research articles, the standard text in laser physics and a book on quantum optics. Scully has received the OSA Adolph E. Lomb Medal, the Elliott Cresson Medal of The Franklin Institute, and the EG&G Medal of the Society for Optical and Quantum Electronics.
He has earned Sloan and Guggenheim Fellowships and a Humboldt Distinguished Senior Faculty Award. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the Optical Society of America, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a member of the Max Planck Society, the German equivalent of the National Academy of Science.
Scully earned the Ph.D. and master’s degrees in physics from Yale University. He holds the bachelor of science degree in engineering physics from the University of Wyoming.
Mike Downey, m-downey@tamu.edu, TEES Communications
06/03/98 NR-98-104
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