Gordon Gould '41, the inventor of the laser, has given the College $1.5 million to establish the Gould Professorship in Physics.
The new professorship honors Frank L. Studer, a former professor of physics at the College who sparked Gould's interest in the physics of light and inspired a love of optics that led to Gould's development of the laser.
President Roger Hull, announcing the gift, said, “This generous gift will help nurture the next generation of scientists, perhaps one of whom will be the next Gordon Gould. We are delighted by it, and we welcome the chair on the eve of our bicentennial.”
The professorship will support a member of the Physics Department; the professor who will occupy the position has not been selected.
Gould was a physics major at Union and did graduate research in optics at Yale, where he taught physics to premed students. He developed the basic concept of the laser in 1957 while he was a doctoral student and research assistant at Columbia University.
He envisioned a way of amplifying light and using the resulting beam to cut and heat substances and measure distances. He dubbed his invention “Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation,” or laser.
Gould now holds licensing agreements with more than 200 laser makers and users, including General Electric, Ford, Toshiba, Spectra-Physics and Coherent the latter two being the world's biggest laser makers.
Gould devoted much of his career to research in optics and was a founder of Optelcom, Inc., an optical communications company from which he retired in 1985. He lives in Breckenridge, Colo.
He was awarded an honorary doctor of science degree by Union in 1978.
Frank J. Studer, the man honored by the Gordon Gould gift, joined the Union faculty in 1930 after teaching at Emory University and the University of Wisconsin. He resigned as a full-time faculty member in the mid-1950s to go to work at the General Electric Company's research laboratory. He remained a research professor at the College for many years, however, advising students on their research projects.