Eric A Cornell earned his B.S. from Stanford University and his Ph.D. from MIT. After completion of his Ph.D., Cornell moved to the University of Colorado, Boulder, where he began work with Carl Wieman, forming the pair who would go on to win the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics. Today, he is a Fellow at JILA and NIST, and is a Professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

He is a Fellow of OSA, and recipient, with Wieman, 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.”