Eric Cornell

Eric Cornell is an adjunct professor at the University of Colorado Boulder and a fellow of JILA, where his research interests focus on various aspects of ultracold atoms. He received the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics in 2001 for creating a never-before-seen state of matter: the Bose-Einstein condensate.

Cornell grew up in Cambridge, MA, and completed his undergraduate studies at Stanford University in 1985. Cornell then returned to Cambridge, where he spent five years earning his Ph.D. at MIT in physicist David Pritchard’s lab. His research focused on measuring very precisely how a single ion (an atom with an electric charge) moves in a magnetic field.

In 1990, Cornell joined physicist Carl Wieman’s group in Boulder and started working on a plan to create a Bose-Einstein condensate using laser cooling and trapping techniques. They would achieve their groundbreaking result five years leater.