Carl Wieman

Carl Edwin Wieman, born in 1951, is an American physicist and educationist at Stanford University. Born in Corvallis, Oregon, he earned his bachelor degree at MIT in 1973 and his doctorate at Stanford in 1977. In 1995, while at the University of Colorado Boulder, he and Eric Allin Cornell produced the first true Bose-Einstein condensate, an ultracold state of matter made from rubidium atoms. In 2001 they shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Wolfgang Ketterle for the achievement of Bose-Einstein condensation in dilute gases of alkali atoms and for early studies of the properties of the condensates. Wieman has since turned much of his work to science education, promoting peer instruction and founding the open online PhET Interactive Simulations, and he received the Yidan Prize in Education Research in 2020.