Soon after Stanford learned that business professor emeritus Michael Spence had become the 17th Stanford faculty member to win a Nobel Prize, word came that three Stanford alumni also had earned some Swedish gold.
Eric A. Cornell, ’85, and Carl E. Wieman, PhD ’77, shared the 2001 physics prize with Wolfgang Ketterle “for creating Bose-Einstein condensation using laser cooling and evaporation techniques.” Cornell is a senior scientist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology and adjoint professor at the University of Colorado-Boulder. Wieman is a physics professor at the University of Colorado-Boulder.
And for his work on “chirally catalysed oxidation reactions,” K. Barry Sharpless, PhD ’68, won the Nobel Prize in chemistry. Sharpless is a professor at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif.
They are the first Stanford alumni to win Nobels since the late John Harsanyi, ’54, won in economic sciences in 1994.
