Jeff Gore

Jeff Gore is an American physicist and associate professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He is also an advocate for repealing the United States penny, through the organization Citizens to Retire the U.S. Penny, which he founded.

Education Gore studied at MIT in the late 1990s as an undergraduate, and received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 2005 with a Hertz Graduate Fellowship. His dissertation research was done in the laboratory of Carlos Bustamante, and focused on single-molecule biophysics.

Activism Gore's anti-penny activism first came to public attention when he posted a calculation of the cost of the penny to Americans in terms of wasted time ($5 billion) while a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the founder of the organization "Citizens to Retire the Penny", through which he advocates for the elimination of the penny. Gore was interviewed on the Colbert Report in 2008 on the subject of pennies; he also endorsed Barack Obama's presidential campaign (this interview took place before the 2008 election).