Born June 13, 1911, in San Francisco. American physicist. Graduated from the University of Chicago in 1932.
Alvarez has been a professor at the University of California since 1945. From 1940 to 1943 he worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and during 1944–45 at Los Alamos Laboratory. His scientific work has been done in the areas of radar, accelerator technology, and elementary particle physics. He directed construction of the first large bubble chamber and the drift-tube linear accelerator at Berkeley. He received a Nobel Prize in 1968 for his work in elementary particle physics.