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Georges Charpak (born August 1, 1924) is a Polish-French physicist and Nobel Prize in Physics laureate.
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Charpak was born in the village of Dąbrowica in Poland (modern Dubrovytsia, Ukraine). Charpak's family moved from Poland to Paris when he was seven years old.
During World War II Charpak served in the resistance and was imprisoned by Vichy authorities in 1943. In 1944 he was deported to the Nazi concentration camp at Dachau, where he remained until the camp was liberated in 1945. After graduating from the Lycée Joffre in Montpellier, in 1945 he joined the Paris-based École des Mines, one of the most prestigious engineering schools in France. The following year he became a naturalized French citizen.
He graduated in 1948, earning the French degree of Civil Engineer of Mines (equivalent to a Master's degree) and started working for the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). He received his doctorate in 1954 from Nuclear Physics at the Collège de France, Paris, where he worked in the laboratory of Frédéric Joliot-Curie. In 1959 he joined the staff of CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) in Geneva and in 1984 also became Joliot-Curie professor at the School of Advanced Studies in Physics and Chemistry (in French 'Ecole Superieure de Physique et de Chimie Industrielles', ESPCI), Paris.
He was made a member of the French Academy of Sciences in 1985. In 1992, he received the Nobel Prize in Physics "for his invention and development of particle detectors, in particular the multiwire proportional chamber". This is the last time a single person has won the physics prize.
In France, Charpak is a very strong advocate for nuclear power. Prof. Charpak is a member of the Board of Sponsors of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists [1].