September 2006
LEON
M. LEDERMAN
Leon M. Lederman,
internationally renowned high-energy physicist, is Director Emeritus of Fermi
National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois and holds an appointment as Pritzker Professor of Science at Illinois Institute of
Technology, Chicago. Dr. Lederman served as Chairman
of the State of Illinois Governor's Science Advisory Committee. He is a founder
and the inaugural Resident Scholar at the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, a 3-year residential public high school
for the gifted. Dr. Lederman was the Director of
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory from 1979 to 1989. He is a founder and
Chairman Emeritus of the Teachers Academy for Mathematics and Science, which was
active in the professional development of primary school teachers in Chicago from 1990 to 2003.
For more than thirty years Dr. Lederman was associated with Columbia University in New York City, having been a student and a faculty
member there. Professor Lederman was the Eugene
Higgins Professor of Physics at Columbia from 1972–79 and served as Director of
Nevis Laboratories in Irvington, Columbia's center for experimental research in
high-energy physics, from 1962–79. With colleagues and students from Nevis he led an extensive and wide-ranging
series of experiments that provided major advances in the understanding of
particles and interactions, thus contributing significantly
to what is known as the "standard model."
Major experiments included the
observation of parity violation in decay of pi and mu
mesons, the discovery of the long-lived neutral kaon,
the discovery of two kinds of neutrinos and the discovery of the upsilon
particle, the first evidence for the bottom quark. His research was based upon
experiments principally using the particle accelerators at Nevis Labs,
Brookhaven and Fermilab, although he has carried out
research at CERN (Geneva), Berkeley, Cornell and Rutherford (England). His publications exceed 300 papers and
he has sponsored the research of 52 graduate students.
He has served as President and Chairman
of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the largest
scientific organization in the U.S. He is a member of the National Academy
of Science; and has received numerous awards, including the National Medal of
Science (1965), the Elliot Cresson Medal of the Franklin Institute (1976), the
Wolf Prize in Physics (1982), the Nobel Prize in Physics (1988), the Enrico Fermi Prize given by President Clinton in 1993, the Abelson Prize of the AAAS (2000), and the AIP Compton Medal
for leadership in physics (2005). Lederman served as
a founding member of the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel of the United
States Department of Energy and the International Committee for Future
Accelerators, as well as a Commissioner for the White House Fellows.
Lederman currently serves on over a dozen boards,
including the Board of the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry, the Union of
Concerned Scientists Advisory Board, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the
Council of American Science Writers, and the Universities Research Association
Board. Dr. Lederman has received honorary degrees,
academic appointments and memberships in over 60 institutions, including those
in England, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Italy, Israel, Finland, Russia, India and China.