Charles V. Shank

Charles V. Shank

Shank, a nationally recognized scientist and research leader, is the retired director of the UC-managed Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He is also a professor emeritus at UC Berkeley, in the departments of physics, chemistry, and electrical engineering and computer sciences. He graduated summa cum laude from Berkeley in 1965 and went on to receive his M.S. and Ph.D. Following graduation, he joined AT&T Bell Labs where he made pioneering contributions to the study of ultrafast events that occur in a millionth of a billionth of a second using short laser pulses. He contributed to fiber optic communications with the invention of the distributed feedback laser, a component in high data rate transmission systems. Working with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the Los Alamos National Laboratory, he helped create the Joint Genome Institute to work on the Human Genome Project.

Dr. Shank’s scientific and service contributions have been recognized through honors that include the R.W. Wood Prize of the Optical Society of America and the David Sarnoff and Morris E. Leeds awards of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a Senior Fellow at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Research Campus and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Physical Society, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and the Optical Society of America.