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Leon Max Lederman (born July 15, 1922) is an American experimental physicist and Nobel Prize in Physics laureate for his work with neutrinos. He is Director Emeritus of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois. He founded the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, in Aurora, Illinois in 1986, and has served in the capacity of Resident Scholar since 1998. Lederman was born in New York to a family of Jewish immigrants from Russia. He received his bachelor's degree from the City College of New York in 1943, and received a Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1951. He then joined the Columbia faculty and eventually became Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics. He took an extended leave of absence from Columbia in 1979 to become Fermilab's director, directing such physicists as Daniel Kaplan. He resigned from Columbia and Fermilab in 1989 and taught briefly at the University of Chicago before moving to the Illinois Institute of Technology, where he currently serves as the Pritzker Professor of Science. Dr. Lederman is also one of the main proponents of the "Physics First" movement. Also known as "Right-side Up Science" and "Biology Last," this movement seeks to rearrange the current high school science curriculum so that physics precedes chemistry and biology. A former president of the American Physical Society, Lederman also received the National Medal of Science, the Wolf Prize and the Ernest O. Lawrence Medal. Dr. Lederman serves as President of the Board of Sponsors of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. He was called a "modern day Leonardo Da Vinci" by the Chicago Museum of Science and Technology.
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