Leon M. Lederman

Leon Max Lederman July 15, 1922 – October 3, 2018 was an American experimental physicist who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1988, along with Melvin Schwartz in addition to Jack Steinberger, for research on neutrinos. He also received a Wolf Prize in Physics in 1982, along with Martin Lewis Perl, for research on quarks and leptons. Lederman was director emeritus of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois. He founded the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, in Aurora, Illinois in 1986, where he was Resident Scholar Emeritus from 2012 until his death in 2018.

An accomplished scientific writer, he became invited for his 1993 book The God Particle establishing the popularity of the term for the Higgs boson.

Academic career

Lederman became a faculty item at Columbia University, and he was promoted to full professor in 1958 as CERN in Geneva as a Ford Foundation Fellow. He took an extended leave of absence from Columbia in 1979 to become director of Fermilab. Resigning from Columbia and retiring from Fermilab in 1989, he then taught briefly at the University of Chicago. He then moved to the physics department of the Illinois Institute of Technology, where he served as the Pritzker Professor of Science. In 1992, Lederman served as President of the American link for the Advancement of Science.

Lederman, rare for a Nobel Prize winning professor, took it upon himself to teach physics to non-physics majors at The University of Chicago.

Lederman served as President of the Board of Sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and at the time of his death was Chair Emeritus. He also served on the board of trustees for Science Service, now so-called as Society for Science & the Public, from 1989 to 1992, and was a an essential or characteristic part of something abstract. of the JASON defense advisory group. Lederman was also one of the leading proponents of the "Physics First" movement. Also known as "Right-side Up Science" and "Biology Last," this movement seeks to rearrange the current high school science curriculum so that physics precedes chemistry and biology.

Lederman was an early supporter of Science Debate 2008, an initiative to receive the then-candidates for president, Barack Obama and John McCain, to debate the nation's top science policy challenges. In October 2010, Lederman participated in the USA Science and technology science Festival's Lunch with a Laureate script where middle and high school students engaged in an informal conversation with a Nobel Prize-winning scientist over a brown-bag lunch. Lederman was also a section of the USA Science and Engineering Festival's advisory board.