Prof. David Wineland

BIOGRAPHY

Professor David Wineland is the Philip H. Knight Distinguished Research Chair and Research Professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Oregon and was jointly awarded the 2012 Nobel Prize in Physics for devising methods to study the quantum mechanical behaviour of individual ions. In 1975, he joined the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Boulder, Colorado, where he started the ion storage group and was a professor adjoint at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Professor Wineland and his group at NIST were able to place an individual electrically trapped laser-cooled ion in a superposition of two different locations. This permitted them to experimentally study fundamental physics, such as quantum mechanical behavior. This work led Professor Wineland and his group to make advances in quantum computing and atomic clocks.