Carl Wieman

Carl Edwin Wieman (born March 26, 1951) is an American physicist and educationist at Stanford University, and the A. D. White Professor at Large at Cornell University. In 1995, while at the University of Colorado Boulder, he and Eric Allin Cornell produced the first true Bose–Einstein condensate (BEC), an ultracold state of matter using rubidium atoms. In 2001, they shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Wolfgang Ketterle “for the achievement of Bose-Einstein condensation in dilute gases of alkali atoms, and for early fundamental studies of the properties of the condensates”. Wieman currently holds a joint appointment as Professor of Physics and Professor in the Stanford Graduate School of Education, as well as the DRC Professor in the Stanford University School of Engineering. He has been active in education, promoting peer instruction and founding the open online PhET Interactive Simulations. In 2020, Wieman was awarded the Yidan Prize in Education Research for "his contribution in developing new techniques and tools in STEM education".