Chung Tang graduated from the University of Washington at Seattle in 1955 with his BS in Electrical Engineering. He went on to Caltech, earning an MS in 1956, and later to Harvard University where he earned his Ph.D. in 1960. From 1959 to 1960, Tang was the John Parker Traveling Fellow at the Technical University in Aachen, Germany. After completing his Ph.D., Tang joined Raytheon Company first as staff and later as a principal research scientist. In 1964, he joined the faculty at Cornell University, from which he retired in 2006. Tang is a Fellow of IEEE, APS, and OSA. In 1996, he was awarded the Charles Hard Townes Award “for seminal and pioneering advances in the field of nonlinear optics and laser physics.”