Eric A. Cornell

Eric Allin Cornell
Eric Cornell as of June 2015
Born	(1961-12-19) December 19, 1961 (age 55) Palo Alto, California, USA
Residence	Boulder, Colorado, USA
Nationality	United States
Fields	Physics
Institutions	University of Colorado National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) JILA
Alma mater	Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Stanford University
Known for	Bose–Einstein condensation
Notable awards	King Faisal International Prize in Science (1997) Lorentz Medal (1998) Nobel Prize in Physics (2001) Benjamin Franklin Medal in Physics (2000)

Eric Allin Cornell (born December 19, 1961) is an American physicist who, along with Carl E. Wieman, was able to synthesize the first Bose–Einstein condensate in 1995. For their efforts, Cornell, Wieman, and Wolfgang Ketterle shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2001.

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 yearlong intermezzos in Berkeley, California, and Lisbon, Portugal, where his father spent sabbatical years.

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.

After high school he enrolled at Stanford University, where he was to meet his future wife, Celeste Landry. As an undergraduate he earned money as an assistant in the various low-temperature physics groups on campus. He was doing well both in his courses and his jobs in the labs and seemed set for a career in physics. He however doubted whether he wished to pursue such a career, or rather a different one in literature or politics. Halfway through his undergraduate years he went to China and Taiwan for nine months to volunteer teaching conversational English and to study Chinese. He learned that this was not where his talents lay, and returned to Stanford with renewed resolve to pursue his true talent - physics. He graduated with honors and distinction in 1985.