DAVID N. SCHRAMM
David N. Schramm (Ph.D., California Institute of Technology, B.S., Massachusetts Institute of Technology) is the Vice President for Research and the Louis Block Distinguished Service Professor in the Physical Sciences at the University of Chicago. He is a Professor in the Department of Physics, the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, the Committee on Conceptual Foundations of Science, the Enrico Fermi Institute, and the College. He was also the founder of the astrophysics group at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois and continues an association there.His research has covered a variety of topics in theoretical astrophysics and cosmology including supernovae, dark matter, the age of the universe and the origin of elements. He is perhaps best known for his work unifying the fields of big bang cosmology and elementary particle physics. His prediction from cosmology about the number of fundamental families of elementary particles has now been verified by accelerator experiments at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland and SLAC in Palo Alto, California. This is one of the only examples of a cosmological argument being verified in a laboratory experiment.
Schramm, who was elected to the National Academy of Science in 1986, and fellowship in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1994, and the Hungarian Academy of Science and the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1995, and has been a fellow of the American Physical Society since 1975, is the recipient of numerous awards including the 1st annual Robert J. Trumpler Award of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific in 1976, the 1978 Helen B. Warner Prize of the American Astronomical Society, the 1980 Gravity Research Prize, the 1984 Richtmeyer Memorial Award of the American Association of Physics Teachers, the 1989 Einstein Medal from Eštvšs University in Budapest, Hungary, and the 1993 Julius Edgar Lilienfeld Prize of the American Physical Society.
Schramm has served on or chaired more than 40 government-sponsored committees and subcommittees for the Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and served on or chaired organizing committees for more than 50 national and international conferences, symposia, schools and workshops. He has given over 300 invited lectures at national and international scientific conferences, symposia, schools and workshops and over 350 invited colloquia and seminars at universities and research institutes world-wide. He also consults for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the Los Alamos National Laboratory as well as other major institutions, and he is the chairman of the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Research Council and chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Aspen Center for Physics and is a member of the Board of Overseers of Fermiab and the Astronomical Research Consortium.
In addition to writing a monthly column entitled "Stargazing" for Outside Magazine, he serves as the Astrophysics Editor of Physics Reports, an international physics journal; a Receiving Editor for New Astronomy, a new international astrophysics journal; and as Astrophysics Series Editor of The University of Chicago Press.
His numerous published writings include over 300 scientific articles, several dozen non-technical articles and book reviews, and over a dozen books, including From Quarks to the Cosmos: Tools of Discovery with Leon Lederman, a Scientific American Library Book (New York, W.H. Freeman, 1989) and Shadows of Creation with E.M. Riordan, forward by S. Hawking (New York: W. H. Freeman, 1990).
A former National Graeco-Roman Wrestling Champion (1971), his current recreational activities include mountain climbing, skiing and piloting his own airplane.