Charles Hard Townes was an American Nobel Prize-winning physicist and inventor. Townes was 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 was born on July 28, 1915 in Greenville, South Carolina, United States. He earned his B.S./B.A. at Furman University. Townes completed work for the Master of Arts degree in Physics at Duke University in 1936, and then entered graduate school at the California Institute of Technology, from where he received a Ph.D. degree in 1939. From 1959 to 1961, he was on leave of absence from Columbia University to serve as Vice President and Director of Research of the Institute for Defense Analyses in Washington, D.C., a nonprofit organization which advised the U.S. government and was operated by eleven universities. Between 1961 and 1967 Townes served as both Provost and Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. President Ronald Reagan awarded him the National Medal of Science in 1982, and in 2005 he received the Templeton Prize for contributions to spiritual understanding.