 degree at Wheaton College (Illinois) and a PhD from the University of Chicago in 1940.He worked in the Radiation Laboratory of MIT from 1941 to 1945, where as part of the war effort he helped in the development of an advanced distant-warning system and airplane-mounted radar.He then worked as an assistant in the Physics Department at Columbia University in 1946 before becoming assistant professor of physics at the University of Illinois and professor of physics there in 1951.