Nobel Laureate Speaker Series 2023–2024

David Wineland received a B.A. degree from the University of California, Berkeley in 1965 and a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1970. Following a postdoctoral position at the University of Washington in Seattle, he joined the Time and Frequency Division of NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) in Boulder, Colorado, from 1975 to 2018, where he was a group leader and NIST Fellow. He is now a Philip H. Knight Distinguished Research Chair and Research Professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Oregon in Eugene, OR.

Starting with graduate school, a long-term goal of his work has been to increase the precision of atomic spectroscopy, the measurement of the frequencies of atoms’ characteristic vibrations. This research has applications to making better atomic clocks and has led to experiments that enable precise control of atomic energy levels and atomic motion. Such control can be applied to metrology whose precision is limited only by the constraints of quantum mechanics and to demonstrations of the basic building blocks of a quantum computer. For this work, he shared the 2012 Nobel Prize in Physics with Serge Haroche, Collège de France, Paris. 

Read more about Dr. Wineland on the NIST sitenew window.

William D. Phillips received a B.S. in physics from Juniata College in 1970, and a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1976;  after two years as a Chaim Weizmann postdoctoral fellow at MIT, he joined NIST (then the National Bureau of Standards) to work on precision electrical measurements and fundamental constants. There, he initiated a new research program to cool atomic gases with laser light. He founded NIST’s Laser Cooling and Trapping Group, and later was a founding member of the Joint Quantum Institute, a cooperative research organization of NIST and the University of Maryland that is devoted to the study of quantum coherent phenomena. His research group has been responsible for developing some of the main techniques now used for laser-cooling and cold-atom experiments in laboratories around the world. Their achievements include the first electromagnetic trapping of neutral atoms; reaching unexpectedly low laser-cooling temperatures, within a millionth of a degree of Absolute Zero; the confinement of atoms in optical lattices; and coherent atom-optical manipulation of atomic-gas Bose-Einstein condensates. Atomic fountain clocks, based on the work of this group, are now the primary standards for world timekeeping and lattice-trapped atoms are among the likely candidates for future primary frequency standards. Among the group’s current research directions are the use of ultra-cold atoms for quantum information processing and quantum simulation of important physical problems. Read more about Dr. Phillips on the NIST sitenew window.

Dr. Phillips is a fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a Fellow and Honorary Member of OPTICA (formerly the Optical Society), a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, and a corresponding member of the Mexican Academy of Sciences. In 1997, Dr. Phillips shared the Nobel Prize in Physics "for development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light."

Dr. John C. Mather is a Civil Servant and Senior Astrophysicist in the Observational Cosmology Laboratory located at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. Until 2023, he served as the Senior Project Scientist on the James Webb Space Telescope, extending the scientific discoveries of the Hubble Space Telescope to look farther out in space and farther back in time.

He grew up in rural New Jersey living on a scientific research facility where his father studied dairy cows. He attended public schools, learned calculus from a book, received a bachelor's degree in physics from Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, and wanted to be like Richard Feynman. But his doctorate in physics from the University of California, Berkeley led him into observations of the Big Bang, with an unsuccessful thesis project that nevertheless inspired the COBE satellite and a Nobel Prize.

As a National Research Council postdoctoral fellow at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York City, he led the proposal efforts for the Cosmic Background Explorer mission (1974-76), and moved to Goddard Space Flight Center to be the lead scientist for the mission.

Mather and the COBE team showed that the cosmic microwave background radiation has a blackbody spectrum within 50 parts per million (ppm), confirming the expanding universe concept (Big Bang theory) to extraordinary accuracy. The team also measured hot and cold spots in the heat radiation; Steven Hawking said it was the greatest scientific discovery of the century, if not of all time.

As Senior Project Scientist (1995-2023) for the Webb telescope, Mather led the science team, and represented scientific interests within the project management. Read more about Dr. Mather on the James Webb Space Telescope sitenew window.

As winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize for Physics, chosen by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Mather shares the prize with George F. Smoot of the University of California for their work using the COBE satellite to measure the heat radiation from the Big Bang. Mather put the prize money into the John and Jane Mather Foundation for Science and the Arts. Mather also sponsors summer interns to work on science policy on Capitol Hill, through the Society of Physics Students.