He was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship through which he attended the University of Oxford, graduating with a master's degree in theoretical physics in 1955.
His doctoral work was at Columbia University, where he earned his Ph.D. under Charles Hard Townes in 1960 with a thesis titled Beam Maser Spectroscopy.
The 1.2 meter Millimeter-Wave Telescope was designed with a relatively small dish and consequently a relatively large beamwidth of about 1/8 degree, which can be likened to a wide-angle lens.
Together, "The Mini" and its twin in Chile have obtained what is by far the most extensive, uniform, and widely used Galactic survey of interstellar carbon monoxide (CO).
Janice Farrar Thaddeus was a scholar, poet, editor, and former Harvard lecturer in English; she died of a stroke in 2001 at the age of 68.