Carl Wieman grew up in the woods of Oregon, near Corvallis. After completing high school, he attended MIT, where he was able to work in Daniel Kleppner’s group. He went on to graduate school at Stanford University. There, he joined Ted Hänsch’s group. After completing his Ph.D., he became an assistant research scientist at the University of Michigan. His independent research there led to a faculty position at the University of Colorado, Boulder, which he took in 1984. Today, he holds a joint appointment as Professor of Physics and of the Graduate School of Education. He received, alongside his colleague Eric A. Cornell, the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics.

He is a Fellow of OSA and recipient, with Cornell, of the R. W. Wood Prize “for creative inventiveness and persistent ingenuity applied to the development of laser techniques for cooling atoms, which led to the first demonstration of Bose-Einstein condensation in an atomic vapor.”