Laura Greene

Born on 12 June 1952 in Cleveland, Ohio, Laura Greene is chief scientist at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory and former president of the American Physical Society. Greene did not start studying physics until she was a freshman at Ohio State University. She earned both a BS and MS in physics, in 1974 and 1978, respectively. She then transferred to Cornell University, where she obtained an MS in experimental physics in 1980 and a PhD in physics in 1984. After working nine years at Bell Labs (later Bellcore), she joined the physics faculty at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Today, in addition to her leadership at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, she is a professor at Florida State University, a professor emeritus at Urbana-Champaign, and associate director for the Center for Emergent Superconductivity. Her research has been in experimental condensed-matter physics. She has focused on the mechanisms of unconventional superconductivity by planar tunneling and point contact electron spectroscopies, and designing new families of superconducting materials. Greene has contributed to some 200 publications, is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and has received a number of honors and awards, including the 1994 Maria Goeppert-Mayer Award of the American Physical Society and the 1999 E. O. Lawrence Award for Materials Research from the Department of Energy. (Photo credit: AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Gift of Laura H. Greene)

Date in History: 12 June 1952