Carl Wieman

Carl Edwin Wieman (born March 26, 1951) is an American physicist of the University of Colorado at Boulder who produced the first true Bose-Einstein condensate in 1995 with his colleague Eric Cornell. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2001, together with Cornell and 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 was born in Corvallis, Oregon in 1951. He earned his Bachelors of Science in 1973 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and later his PhD. from Stanford University in 1977. In 1997, Wieman was also given a Doctorate of Science (Honorary) from the University of Chicago. He was awarded the Lorentz Medal in 1998 and in 2004, he was named United States Professor of the Year, an award given to a professor chosen from all the doctoral and research universities throughout the country.

More recently, Wieman has been more involved in trying to improve science education. He uses and has become a big advocate of a system called "peer instruction", where teachers repeatedly ask multiple-choice concept questions during class, and students reply on the spot with little wireless "clicker" devices. If a large proportion of the class chooses a wrong answer, students discuss among themselves and reply again.

Wieman Research group:
http://spot.colorado.edu/~cwieman/

Interviews of Carl Weiman from the National Academy of Sciences

http://www.nasonline.org/site/PageServer?pagename=INTERVIEWS_Carl_Wieman