Eric Allin Cornell

Eric Allin Cornell (born December 19, 1961) is an American physicist who, along with Carl E. Wieman, synthesized the first Bose–Einstein condensate in 1995. Cornell, Wieman and Wolfgang Ketterle shared the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics “for the achievement of Bose-Einstein condensation in dilute gases of alkali atoms, and for early fundamental studies of the properties of the condensates”.

Biography Cornell was born in Palo Alto, California, where his parents were completing graduate degrees at nearby Stanford University. Two years later he moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where his father was a professor of civil engineering at MIT. Here he grew up with his younger brother and sister, with year-long stints in Berkeley, California, and Lisbon, Portugal, accompanying his father whilst on sabbatical.

In Cambridge he attended Cambridge Rindge and Latin School. The year before his graduation he moved back to California with his mother and finished high school at San Francisco's Lowell High School, a local magnet school for academically talented students.

He is currently a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder and a physicist (NIST fellow) at the United States Department of Commerce National Institute of Standards and Technology. His lab is located at JILA. He was awarded the Lorentz Medal in 1998 and is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005.

Awards and honors Cornell received multiple awards including the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2001.

Ioannes Marcus Marci Medal for Molecular Spectroscopy, Ioannes Marcus Marci Spectroscopic Society, Czech Republic, 2012 Fellow, American Academy of Arts & Sciences, 2005 Nobel Prize in Physics, 2001 Member, National Academy of Sciences, 2000 Fellow, Optical Society of America, Elected 2000 R. W. Wood Prize, Optical Society of America, 1999 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Physics, 1999 Lorentz Medal, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1998 Fellow, The American Physical Society, Elected 1997 I. I. Rabi Prize in Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics, American Physical Society, 1997 King Faisal International Prize in Science, 1997 National Science Foundation Alan T. Waterman Award, 1997 Carl Zeiss Award, Ernst Abbe Fund, 1996 Fritz London Prize in Low Temperature Physics, 1996 Department of Commerce Gold Medal, 1996 Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering, 1996 Newcomb-Cleveland Prize, American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1995–96 George Gamow Memorial Lecture, 1995 Samuel Wesley Stratton Award, National Institute of Science and Technology, 1995

Personal life Cornell married Celeste Landry in 1995 mere months before the BEC experiment succeeded. Their first daughter was born in 1996, and their second daughter in 1998. Cornell has run in the Bolder Boulder several times since moving to Boulder in 1990, most recently in 2022.