Leon Lederman

Physicist; Director Emeritus, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Illinois

Leon Lederman is a physicist best known for his discovery of the muon neutrino in 1962 and the bottom quark in 1977. After studying at the City College of New York and Columbia University, he joined the faculty of Columbia, where he rose to the position of Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics. He was Director of Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois between 1979 and 1989 before moving to the illinois Institute of Technology. In 1986, he founded the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, and is currently Resident Scholar there.

Lederman is a former President of the American Physical Society amd currently serves as President of the Board of Sponsors of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1988 along with Melvin Schwartz and Jack Steinberger, and was also the recipient of the 1965 National Medal of Science and the 1982 Wolf Prize for Physics. He is the co-author of a number of books, including The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question? (1993, with Dick Teresi), and From Quarks to the Cosmos (1989, with David N Schramm).