Charles
R. Munnerlyn, the founding father of laser vision correction, was named
to the Academy of Distinguished Former Students at Texas A&M University’s
College of Science in 2003.
(College Station)—Those who achieve great things often can pinpoint a single event that determined the course of their lives. For Charles R. Munnerlyn, Texas A&M University Class of ‘62, that event occurred in the seventh grade when he picked up a pair of discarded eyeglasses.
“I took the lenses out of the glasses and put them in each end of a cardboard tube,” Munnerlyn said. “I looked out into the pasture and saw the cows upside down. I had to figure out why.”
That optical puzzle was the first of many he successfully solved.
With his invention of the photorefractive keratectomy (PRK) process in the mid-1980s, Munnerlyn played a crucial role in the advent of one of today’s most common medical procedures: laser vision correction. PRK uses the excimer laser system to correct refractive errors by surgically removing corneal tissue with laser light.
“The excimer laser was a crowning achievement primarily because no one else thought it would work,” Munnerlyn said. He founded California-based VISX Inc., which quickly became the leading manufacturer of laser-vision correction systems in the United States. He retired in June.
Munnerlyn and his wife, Judy, have recently made several gifts to Texas A&M and to Judy’s alma mater, Texas Christian University. The contributions to Texas A&M include a $200,000 cash gift toward an endowed professorship in physics and a $3 million charitable remainder unitrust. The charitable trust will fund an endowed chair in observational astronomy, an endowed career enhancement professorship in physics and an endowed fund for departmental programs and activities.
George P. Mitchell ’40 and the Herman F. Heep and Minnie Belle Heep Texas A&M University Foundation will provide matching funds for the endowed chair and endowed professorship.
Munnerlyn began building telescopes in middle school, and by his high school days in Edna, he was constructing optical instruments and taking photos with telescope-mounted cameras.
His interest in physics brought him to Texas A&M, where he enthusiastically enrolled in the only optics course offered. For an English course in scientific writing, he built an “astrocamera,” designed to photograph stars and comets. He served as a teaching assistant for a summer astronomy program.
“I took every opportunity I could to do things that related to optics or astronomy,” he said.
Following a stint in the Air Force, Munnerlyn earned a doctorate at the Institute of Optics at the University of Rochester. In 1999 he became one of the first non-physicians to receive the title of President’s Honored Lecturer by the International Society of Refractive Surgery. Two years later he was voted the Design News Engineer of the Year.
In honor of the Munnerlyns’ gifts, Texas A&M’s Facilities and Planning Building will become the Charles R. Munnerlyn ’62 Astronomy and Space Science Engineering Building.