[2] He was bedridden for a year prior to college with rheumatic fever and used that sabbatical to study physics, calculus and chess before receiving his B.A.
[2] After graduation, he received his PhD from Harvard University, where he was supervised by Nobel laureate Norman Foster Ramsey Jr.[2][3] His doctoral thesis was based on his experimental work conducted in the Brookhaven National Laboratory.
[2] In 1966, he was recruited by California Institute of Technology professor Harold Lurie to start a program in nuclear energy and received a professorship in applied science.
[4] Corngold joined Caltech's applied physics department in the 1970s and remained a professor until his retirement.
[3] He received the Arthur Holly Compton Award for "outstanding contribution to education in the field of science and engineering" and the Eugene P. Wigner Award for "outstanding contributions toward the advancement in the field of nuclear reactor physics" from the American Nuclear Society.