John L. Hall

John Lewis Hall, known as Jan, is an American physicist born in Denver, Colorado, in 1934. He took his bachelor, master and doctoral degrees at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, finishing the doctorate in 1961, and then moved to the National Bureau of Standards, now the National Institute of Standards and Technology, where he stayed from 1962 until his retirement in 2004. He has also lectured at the University of Colorado Boulder since 1967 and remains a Fellow of JILA, the research institute run jointly by the university and NIST. Hall shared half of the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physics with Theodor W. Hansch for pioneering laser-based precision spectroscopy and the optical frequency comb technique, the other half going to Roy J. Glauber. His earlier honors include the Max Born Award of the Optical Society of America, given for his work on stable lasers.