Born on 28 February 1930 in New York City, Leon Cooper is a solid-state physicist and Nobel laureate best known for his contribution to a successful theory of superconductivity. Cooper attended Columbia University, where he earned his PhD in physics in 1954. He then worked various stints at the Institute for Advanced Study, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the Ohio State University before settling at Brown University in 1958. There he was appointed Henry Ledyard Goddard University Professor in 1966 and Thomas J. Watson Sr Professor of Science in 1974. It was in 1957, while Cooper was at the University of Illinois, that he, John Bardeen, and Robert Schrieffer proposed the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) theory of superconductivity, which attributes the phenomenon to the pairing of electrons caused by their interaction with phonons. Such Cooper pairs, as they are called, were first described by Cooper in 1956. For their revolutionary work, the three were awarded the 1972 Nobel Prize in Physics. In 1973 Cooper switched his focus to biology, specifically brain research. He became the first director of Brown University’s Institute for Brain and Neural Systems, where he studied brain networks and memory. Cooper retired from teaching in 2014 but continues to do research. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, as well as a member of the National Academy of Sciences. (Photo credit: Kenneth C. Zirkel, CC BY-SA 3.0)
