Eric Allin Cornell

Eric Allin Cornell, born in 1961, is an American physicist. He was born in Palo Alto, California, grew up mostly in Cambridge, Massachusetts, graduated from Stanford University with honors in 1985 and took his doctorate at MIT in 1990. He then joined Carl Wieman at the University of Colorado Boulder as a postdoctoral researcher, where he devised a plan to combine laser cooling and evaporative cooling in a magnetic trap to make a Bose-Einstein condensate. Together they synthesized the first Bose-Einstein condensate in 1995, and with Wolfgang Ketterle they shared the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics for the achievement of Bose-Einstein condensation in dilute gases of alkali atoms. He is a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder and a NIST fellow at JILA, and received the Lorentz Medal in 1998.