Claude Cohen-Tannoudji was born in 1933. He completed his Ph.D. in 1962 at Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, after which he took the position of Professor at the University of Paris from 1964 to 1973.
Since 1973, he has been Professor of Atomic and Molecular Physics at the Collège de France in Paris.
He is a member of the French Académie des Sciences and of the European Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is Foreign Associate of the US National Academy of Sciences, of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, of the Académie Royale des Sciences, des Lettres et des Beaux-Arts of Belgium and of the Accademia dei Lincei of Italy.
Among the many awards and prizes he has received are the Ampère Prize of the Academie des Sciences, the Thomas Young Medal and Prize of the Institute of Physics, a Research Award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Lilienfeld Prize of the American Physical Society, the Charles Townes Award of the Optical Society of America, the Matteucci Medal of the Accademia Nazionale delle Scienze, the Harvey Prize in Science and Technology of the Technion Israel Institute of Technology, the Quantum Electronics Prize of the European Physical Society, and the Gold Medal of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique.
He is Doctor Honoris Causa of the University of Uppsala and co-laureate of the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics.
He co-wrote "Quantum Mechanics" with Bernard Diu and Franck Laloë, as well as "Photon and Atoms" and "Atom Photon Interactions", both with Jacques Dupont-Roc and Gilbert Grynberg. He has also published a collection of selected reprints, "Atoms in Electromagnetic Fields," edited by World Scientific, and he has written extensively on various problems of atomic physics and quantum optics.
The University of Texas at Austin