Trailblazer of Physics: The Extraordinary Life of Leon Lederman

September 25, 2019
5:30 pm – 8:00 pm

Cindy Pritzker Auditorium, Chicago Public Library, Harold Washington Center
Harold Washington Library, 400 South State Street, Chicago, IL, USA

Program Series:
Physical Science

Watch the event here!

This event will highlight Dr. Lederman’s contributions to science research at Fermilab and beyond, science education, and science outreach.

Dr. Leon Lederman was a Nobel prize-winning physicist with a passion for science education. He served as the director of Fermilab from 1979 to 1989. In 1992, he moved to the Illinois Institute of Technology, where he chose to teach freshman physics. He retired in 2011. With a career that spanned more than 60 years, Lederman, who passed away last year, became one of the most important figures in the history of particle physics. He was responsible for several breakthrough discoveries, uncovering new particles that elevated our understanding of the fundamental universe. His Nobel Prize was awarded in 1988 for discovery of the muon neutrino. But perhaps his most critical achievements were his influence on the field of physics and his efforts to improve science education. In later years, Lederman continued his outreach efforts, often in memorable ways. Sometimes, he would even set up shop on the streets of New York City and Chicago, and answer science questions from passersby.

Through his research, Lederman set the stage for Fermilab’s past and future success. The international Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility/Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, hosted by Fermilab, is an international flagship science project to unlock the mysteries of neutrinos. By studying neutrinos, particles at the heart of Dr. Lederman’s work, scientists at Fermilab and across the world will paint a clearer picture of the universe and how it works. This will be the largest science experiment ever hosted on U.S. soil.

During this celebration of Dr. Lederman’s legacy, expect a variety of physics-themed discussions and events, including a Physics Slam and an Ask-a-Physicist panel!

A Physics Slam is a fun competition that pairs a student from the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy (co-founded by Dr. Lederman) with a Fermilab scientist. Expect a no-holds-barred, light-hearted competition. Who will the audience choose as the winner?

In the spirit of his outreach efforts, the program also will have an Ask-a-Physicist panel. A team of scientists will take questions from the audience, in the same informal style of Dr. Lederman taking questions from people in Chicago and New York City.

Event Details

Wednesday, September 25, 2019, 5:30 p.m. to 8:00 p.m., Chicago Public Library, Harold Washington Library Center, Cindy Pritzker Auditorium (lower level), 400 South State Street, Chicago, IL 60605. This program is FREE to attend but tickets will be required if the event sells out, so please register ahead of time. Seating will be first-come, first-served.

5:30 PM – Check-in, exhibit viewing

6:00 PM – Program starts: Fermilab’s Past and Future

With Nigel Lockyer, Director of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory

Joe Lykken, Deputy Director of Research at Fermilab

6:20 PM – Leon’s contributions to science education and founding of Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy (IMSA)

With Rocky Kolb, Arthur Holly Compton Distinguished Service Professor of Astronomy; Astrophysics and the Dean of the Physical Sciences at the University of Chicago, as well as a member of the Enrico Fermi Institute and Director of the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics

6:30 PM – Mini-Physics Slam

With Minerba Betancourt, Cindy Joe, and Sasha Rahlin: Fermilab physicists will be paired with some of the brightest students from IMSA!

7:00 PM – Ask-a-Physicist Panel

With Jessica Esquivel, PhD, a recent PhD graduate in Physics and is currently working as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Fermilab.

Michael S. Turner, PhD, a theoretical cosmologist, who coined the term dark energy in 1998. He is the Bruce V. & Diana M. Rauner Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, and was formerly the Assistant Director for Mathematical and Physical Sciences for the US National Science Foundation from 2003–2006.

Kirsty Duffy, PhD, a physicist and Lederman Fellow at Fermilab.

Don Lincoln, PhD, a senior scientist at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) and adjunct professor of physics at the University of Notre Dame.

7:45 PM – Program ends, exhibit viewing

Parking and Transportation

The Harold Washington Center is easily accessible by most CTA trains and multiple bus lines. For detailed travel information visit www.transitchicago.com or call the Travel Information Center at 1-888-YOUR-CTA or 1-888-CTA-TTY1 (TTY). For parking options, please visit https://www.chipublib.org/plan-your-visit-to-hwlc/parking-near-hwlc/.

Notice: As a guest of Chicago Council on Science and Technology (C2ST), you agree to be photographed, videotaped, or filmed and grant C2ST permission to put the finished footage/photography to any uses that it may deem proper including marketing, advertising (print, radio, and television) and PR-related activities.

We are dedicated to providing an inclusive environment for everyone. Please respect diversity in individuals and in cultures.

Featured Guests

Nigel Lockyer, PhD

Nigel Lockyer began his tenure as Director of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in September 2013. Under his leadership, Fermilab has realigned its mission with the recommendations of the Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel report and has set a course for world leadership in accelerator-based neutrino research through the construction of the Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility, Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment and Proton Improvement Plan (PIP-II). As part of the mission, Fermilab plans to produce the most powerful, high-intensity neutrino beams by upgrading the accelerator complex beginning with PIP-II. An experimental particle physicist, Lockyer spent six years at the helm of TRIUMF, Canada’s national laboratory for nuclear and particle physics, from 2007 to 2013. Lockyer holds a PhD in physics from The Ohio State University, is a fellow of the American Physical Society and received the society’s 2006 Panofsky Prize for his leading research on the bottom quark.

Joseph Lykken, PhD

Joseph Lykken is Fermilab’s Deputy Director of Research. A distinguished scientist at the laboratory, Lykken was a former member of the Theory Department and is a member of the CMS experiment on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. He received his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and has previously worked for the Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics and the University of Chicago. Lykken began his tenure at Fermilab in 1989. He is a former member of the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel, which advises both the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation, and served on the Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel, developing a road map for the next 20 years of U.S. particle physics. Lykken is a fellow of the American Physical Society and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Rocky Kolb, PhD

Edward W. Kolb (known to most as Rocky) is the Arthur Holly Compton Distinguished Service Professor of Astronomy; Astrophysics and the Dean of the Physical Sciences at the University of Chicago, as well as a member of the Enrico Fermi Institute and Director of the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics. In 1983, he was a founding head of the Theoretical Astrophysics Group and in 2004 the founding Director of the Particle Astrophysics Center at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois.

Kolb is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Fellow of the American Physical Society. He was the recipient of the 2003 Oersted Medal of the American Association of Physics Teachers for notable contributions to the teaching of physics, the 1993 Quantrell Prize for teaching excellence at the University of Chicago and the 2009 Excellence in Teaching Award from the Graham School of the University of Chicago. His book for the general public, “Blind Watchers of the Sky,” received the 1996 Emme Award of the American Aeronautical Society.

The field of Rocky’s research is the application of elementary particle physics to the very early Universe. In addition to over 200 scientific papers, he is a co-author of “The Early Universe,” the standard textbook on particle physics and cosmology.

Minerba Betancourt, PhD

Minerba Betancourt earned her PhD at the University of Minnesota, working on the NOvA neutrino experiment. After that, she was a Post-doctoral researcher at Fermilab and she is currently a Wilson Fellow, working for the MINERvA neutrino experiment. Outside of the standard research and related duties, she is involved in outreach through the Saturday Morning program and mentoring high school, undergraduate and PhD students. Betancourt grew up in Merida-Venezuela, while at home she was a teacher.

Grace Yue

Dr. Minerba Betancourt’s student partner from IMSA.

Cindy Joe

Cindy Joe is an engineering physicist in Fermilab’s Neutrino Division. She primarily works with NOvA and MicroBooNE as their experiment liaison officer and is also the coordinator of the MINOS Underground experimental area. While obtaining her bachelor’s degree in physics at Reed College, she became a licensed senior reactor operator at their nuclear research reactor. She then moved to even bigger machines, working as a particle accelerator operator in Fermilab’s Main Control Room for seven years before taking her current role.

Cindy is very involved in lab life: she has served on the Employee Advisory Group, as a Fermilab Student and Postdoc Association officer, on the lab Sustainability Management Team, and more. She is deeply passionate about science outreach (in particular for young women, minorities, and members of the public) and frequently contributes: Physics Slam (x 2), PechaKucha Night Batavia, Symmetry Magazine, a profile on the Department of Energy website, the Story Collider podcast. She currently lectures in Fermilab’s Saturday Morning Physics program for high school students.

Aaron Calhoun

Cindy Joe’s student partner from IMSA.

Sasha Rahlin, PhD

Sasha graduated from IMSA in 2004 and got her Bachelor’s degree in physics at MIT. She finished her PhD at Princeton University, where she worked on building and deploying the SPIDER balloon-borne telescope, which launched in 2015 off the coast of Antarctica. She is now a postdoctoral researcher at Fermilab, working on the South Pole Telescope project and development for the next generation ground-based cosmology instrument called CMB-S4. Since graduate school, her focus has been on instrumentation, data analysis and control systems for telescopes specifically designed to study the Cosmic Microwave Background: the faint glow left over from the Big Bang billions of years ago, whose structure encodes details of how our Universe evolved from its very beginning until today. The science is awe-inspiring, the day-to-day work is super engaging, and best of all, she gets to travel to the farthest reaches of the earth to explore the farthest reaches of time and space!

TJ Ptak

Dr. Sasha Rahlin’s student partner from IMSA.

Jessica Esquivel, PhD

Dr. Jessica Esquivel is a recent PhD graduate in Physics and is currently working as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Fermilab. Dr. Esquivel is one of fewer than ~150 black women with a PhD in Physics in the United States. She is on the Muon g-2 experiment studying the electron’s heavier brother, the muon. Fermilab explores the universe at the smallest and largest scales in order to study the fundamental particles and forces that govern the universe. Jessica’s graduate work focused on detecting ghostly particles called neutrinos in order to help us to crack several big mysteries of the universe. In addition to her research, Jessica is passionate about STEM outreach, bringing awareness to the lack of diversity in physics, and encouraging young minorities to reach their full potential.

Michael S. Turner, PhD

Michael S. Turner is a theoretical cosmologist, who coined the term dark energy in 1998. He is the Bruce V. & Diana M. Rauner Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, and was formerly the Assistant Director for Mathematical and Physical Sciences for the US National Science Foundation from 2003–2006. His book The Early Universe, co-written with fellow Chicago cosmologist Rocky Kolb and published in 1990, is a standard text on the subject.

Turner helped establish the interdisciplinary field that combines together cosmology and elementary particle physics to understand the origin and evolution of the Universe. His research focuses on the earliest moments of creation, and he has made contributions to inflationary cosmology, particle dark matter and structure formation, the theory of big bang nucleosynthesis, and the nature of dark energy.

Kirsty Duffy, PhD

Kirsty is a physicist and Lederman Fellow at Fermilab, the largest particle accelerator lab in the USA. She studies neutrinos, tiny particles that make up most of our universe but we know very little about. Originally from the North-East of England, Kirsty earned her degree and PhD at the University of Oxford, where she worked on an experiment in Japan trying to understand whether neutrinos could explain why we have a universe made of matter instead of antimatter (pretty big questions!). Kirsty has been in the US since August 2017 and is having a great time trying to see as much of the country as possible in between research. When she’s not working, Kirsty can be found singing karaoke, drinking wine, running, catching up with friends, or accidentally ordering chips when she wanted fries (it never seems to sink in!).

Don Lincoln, PhD

Dr. Don Lincoln is a senior scientist doing research at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) and adjunct professor of physics at the University of Notre Dame. Born in 1964, he received his Ph.D. from Rice University. After postdoctoral appointments at the University of Michigan and Fermilab, he became a member of the Fermilab scientific staff in 1999.

His research has spanned many of the topics of modern particle physics, from better characterizing the known laws of physics, to looking for new and previously unknown phenomena. He currently analyzes data gathered by the Large Hadron Collider.

He has coauthored over 1,000 scientific papers and supervised many students. His noteworthy scientific accomplishments involve being a co-discoverer of the top quark and the Higgs boson. He has written several books for non-scientists about particle physics. He has made about 100 science videos for the Fermilab YouTube channel and two long video classes with the Great Courses Company. He has also written for many popular science outlets, including Scientific American, the NOVA website, LiveScience and CNN.

He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was the recipient of the 2013 Outreach Prize from the European Physical Society and the 2017 Gemant Award from the American Institute of Physics for his efforts in communicating science to the public.

Moderator: Adrienne Coleman, PhD

Dr. Adrienne Coleman, a nationally recognized speaker/researcher, serves as director of equity and inclusion at the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy (IMSA). In this role, she assesses potential barriers and develops strategies focused on recruiting and retaining a diverse workforce as well as underrepresented student population and designs training initiatives to increase awareness and support of equity and inclusion values, and maintaining compliance with applicable laws. She previously worked at Rutgers University as a Program Development Specialist, Research Assistant and Adjunct Faculty with the Bloustein School of Public Health as well as at Illinois State University as a Health Educator. She has served as an AmeriCorps member and has been part of the United States delegation team that assisted Moldova (Eastern Europe) in addressing issues of human trafficking and inadequate health education.

Moderator: Sasha Prokuda, PhD

Alexandra “Sasha” Prokuda, PhD, is the Director of Programs and Engagement at the Chicago Council on Science and Technology (C2ST). Before working at C2ST, she was a research and teaching assistant and contributing consultant for the UC Riverside Institute for Development of Education Applications (IDEA Lab). While working on her graduate degree, she volunteered at the Riverside Metropolitan Museum, taught an after-school class at a local elementary school, and founded a scientific meet-up group. Before graduate school, Sasha interpreted science for the public all over the US while working with birds, weasels, deer, bears and Giant Redwoods. Sasha holds a PhD in Evolutionary and Behavioral Biology from the University of California, Riverside and a BS in Biology from Penn State.

Peter Dong, PhD

Science Faculty, IMSA

Dr. Peter Dong is interested in experimental high-energy, especially top quark and higgs, and computational statistics in high-background. He also enjoys studying music theory and public speaking and finding pedagogical methods to teach quantum mechanics to students.

The Chicago Council on Science and Technology