John Robert Schrieffer
b. May 31, 1931, Oak Park, Ill., U.S.A.
John Robert Schrieffer is American physicist and winner, with John Bardeen and Leon N. Cooper, of the 1972 Nobel Prize for Physics for developing the BCS theory (for their initials), the first successful microscopic theory of superconductivity.
Schrieffer a student of
the University of
Illinois, 1954 Following his graduation from Eustis High School in 1949, Schrieffer was admitted to Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where for two years he majored in electrical engineering, then changed to physics in his junior year. He completed a bachelor's thesis in 1953 on the multiple structure in heavy atoms under the direction of Professor John C. Slater. Following up on an interest in solid state physics developed while at MIT, he began graduate studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where he immediately began research with Professor John Bardeen . After working out a problem dealing with electrical conduction on semiconductor surfaces, Schrieffer spent a year in the laboratory, applying the theory to several surface problems. In the third year of graduate studies, he joined Bardeen and Cooper in developing the theory of superconductivity, which constituted his doctoral dissertation in 1957.
Schrieffer spent the academic year 1957-58 as a National Science Foundation fellow at the University of Birmingham and the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, where he continued research in superconductivity. Following a year as assistant professor at the University of Chicago, he returned to the University of Illinois in 1959 as a faculty member. In 1960 he returned to the Bohr Institute for a summer visit, during which he became engaged to Anne Grete Thomsen whom he married at Christmas of that year. The Schrieffers have three children, Bolette, Paul, and Regina. In 1962 Schrieffer joined the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, where in 1964 he was appointed Mary Amanda Wood Professor in Physics. | |
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