The Frances and Charles Townes Fellowship

Established in 1999 thanks to the generosity of Mrs. Lee M. Gunther-Mohr and Dr. Gerard Gunther-Mohr, the Townes Fellowship commemorates  Professor Charles Hard Townes and his invention of the maser at Columbia. The Fellowship is awarded annually to one or more outstanding graduate students working in optics, condensed matter physics or related fields.

Previous Fellows

  • 2003: Feng Wang
  • 2005: Yang Wu
  • 2006 Yuanbo Zhang
  • 2007: Duohua Song
  • 2008: Erik Henriksen
  • 2009: Jeremy Carlo
  • 2012: Andrea Young
  • 2012: Dmitri Efetov
  • 2013: Liuyan Zhao
  • 2014: Carl Ortiz
  • 2014: Yilei Li
  • 2015: Lian Liu
  • 2016: Benjamin Frandsen
  • 2016: Michael McDonald
  • 2017: Drew Edelberg
  • 2018: Geoffrey Iwata
  • 2020: Alexander Kerelsky
  • 2020: Aaron Sternbach
  • 2021: Weijun Yuan
  • 2021: Yilun Gao
  • 2022: Varun Varun
  • 2022: Alex Hernandes Casares
  • 2022: Joseph Lee
  • 2023: Eric Sierra Garzo
  • 2024: Haneul Kwak
  • 2024: Lifan Zhang
  • 2024: Yuchen Lin