Rate My Professor John Bardeen

John Bardeen earned a Bachelor of Science and a Master of Science in electrical engineering from the University of Wisconsin. He received his Ph.D. in mathematical physics from Princeton University in 1936. Following his doctorate, Bardeen held positions as a Junior Fellow at Harvard University and as an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota from 1938 to 1941. During World War II, he served as a physicist at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory. In 1945, he joined Bell Telephone Laboratories, where he contributed to the invention of the transistor in 1947.

Bardeen became Professor of Electrical Engineering and Physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1951, a position he held until becoming professor emeritus. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1956 for the transistor work and again in 1972 for the BCS theory of superconductivity developed with Leon Cooper and John Robert Schrieffer. His research focused on solid-state physics, and he received numerous honors including the National Medal of Science. Bardeen passed away in 1991.