Question: When was the man the Charles Hard Townes Award of The Optical Society is a prize for Quantum Electronics was named after born?

 Townes worked on the theory and application of the maser, for which he obtained the fundamental patent, and other work in quantum electronics associated with both maser and laser devices. Charles Hard Townes (July 28, 1915 – January 27, 2015) was an American physicist and inventor of the maser and laser.  He shared the Nobel Prize in Physics during 1964 with Nikolay Basov and Alexander Prokhorov.  Charles was an advisor to the United States Government, meeting every US President from Harry Truman (1945) to Bill Clinton (1999). <SEP> The Charles Hard Townes Award of The Optical Society is a prize for Quantum Electronics (physics of lasers).  It is named after Charles H. Townes and is awarded annually since 1981. <SEP> Albert Stolow is the Canada Research Chair in Molecular Photonics, Full Professor of Chemistry & Biomolecular Sciences and of Physics, and a Member of the Ottawa Institute for Systems Biology at the University of Ottawa.  He is the founder and an ongoing member of the Molecular Photonics Group at the National Research Council of Canada.  He is Adjunct Professor of Chemistry and of Physics at Queen’s University in Kingston, and a Graduate Faculty Scholar in the Department of Physics, University of Central Florida and a Fellow of the Max-Planck-uOttawa Centre for Extreme and Quantum Photonics.  In 2008, he was elected a Fellow in the American Physical Society, nominated by its Division of Chemical Physics in 2008, for "contributions to ultrafast laser science as applied to molecular physics, including time-resolved studies of non-adiabatic dynamics in excited molecules, non-perturbative quantum control of molecular dynamics, and dynamics of polyatomic molecules in strong laser fields".  In 2008, Stolow won the Keith Laidler Award of the Canadian Society for Chemistry, for "a distinguished contribution to the field of physical chemistry, recognizing early career achievement".  In 2009, he was elected a Fellow of the Optical Society of America for "the application of ultrafast optical techniques to molecular dynamics and control, in particular, studies of molecules in strong laser fields and the development of new methods of optical quantum control".  In 2013, he was awarded the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal (Canada).  In 2017, Stolow was awarded the Earle K. Plyler Prize for Molecular Spectroscopy and Dynamics of the American Physical Society for "the development of methods for probing and controlling ultrafast dynamics in polyatomic molecules, including time-resolved photoelectron spectroscopy and imaging, strong field molecular ionization, and dynamic Stark quantum control".  His group's research interests include ultrafast molecular dynamics and quantum control, time-resolved photoelectron spectroscopy and imaging, strong field & attosecond physics of polyatomic molecules, and coherent non-linear optical microscopy of live cells/tissues, materials and geological samples. <SEP> Prof. Dr. Herbert Walther (born January 19, 1935 in Ludwigshafen/Rhein, Germany – died July 22, 2006 in Munich) was an internationally acclaimed leader in the fields of quantum optics and laser physics.  He was a founding director of the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics (MPQ) in Garching, Germany.  He also was Chair of Physics at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.  He is primarily known for his experimental work on cavity quantum electrodynamics (in the form of the micromaser) as well his groundbreaking work on the ion trap.  At the time of his death he had over 600 publications and numerous awards from a number of prestigious physics and optics societies.  In 1988 he received the Einstein Prize for Laser Science, in 1990 he received the Charles Hard Townes Award, in 1993 the Albert A. Michelson Medal from the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia and in 2003 the Frederic Ives Medal of The Optical Society.