National Institute of Standards and Technology (U.S.)

Michael Danos was born in Latvia in 1922, the son of a Hungarian opera singer stranded in that country by the outbreak of World War I. He studied electrical engineering and physics in Riga, Latvia and Dresden, Germany, surviving the 1945 Allied firebombing of Dresden. After the conclusion of World War II he lived in a displaced persons camp in Hanover, and it was while living there that he completed his degrees in electrical engineering and physics.

After immigrating to the United States, Danos did post-doctoral research at Columbia University with Charles Townes, developer of the first laser, from 1952-1954. From 1954-1994 Danos worked for the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the National Bureau of Standards. During the 1950s and 1960s his research focused on photonuclear physics, a field in which it has been claimed he was the most cited author at the time of his death. In the 1970s and 1980s he altered his focus to work on relativistic heavy ions; his studies were important in the development of the heavy ion collider at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Long Island, New York. By the 1990s, Danos had begun working on quantum computing, but also developed high-caliber x-ray imaging devices through his firm, Rayex Co. He also worked as a visiting scholar at the Enrico Fermi Institute of the University of Chicago.

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