Schawlow with a laser ray gun. Arthur Leonard Schawlow (May 5, 1921 - April 28, 1999) was an American physicist. After earning his undergraduate degree he continued in graduate school at the University of Toronto which was interrupted by WWII. At the end of the war he began work on his Ph.D at U of T. He then took a postdoctoral position with Charles Townes at the physics department of Columbia University in the fall of 1949. He went on to accept a position at Bell Labs in late 1951. He left in 1961 to join the faculty at Stanford University as a professor. He remained until he retired to emeritus status in 1996. Although his research focused on optics, in particular, lasers and their use in spectroscopy, he also pursued investigations in the areas of superconductivity and nuclear resonance. Schawlow shared the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physics with Nicolaas Bloembergen and Kai Siegbahn for their contributions to the development of laser spectroscopy. He died of leukemia in 1999 at the age of 77.