Don Lincoln

Education

He received a Doctor of Philosophy in experimental particle physics from Rice University in 1994.

Career

In 1995, he was a codiscoverer of the top quark. He is also the author of books describing particle physics written for the public. They are "Understanding the Universe: From Quarks to the Cosmos (Revised edition)" (2012) and "The Quantum Frontier: The Large Hadron Collider" (2009) and "The Large Hadron Collider: The Extraordinary Story of the Higgs Boson and Other Things That Will Blow Your Mind" (2014).

In 2013, he released a book called "Alien Universe: Extraterrestrials in our Minds and in the Cosmos," which explains how the common images of extraterrestrials came to enter Western culture and then goes on to explore what modern physics, chemistry and biology can tell us about what real intelligent alien life might be like.

He been involved in a number of videos dedicated to dessiminating discoveries in particle physics and since July 7, 2011 has been a keynote speaker for a series produced by Fermilab that explores the range of issues dominating particle physics today in an accessible and sometime humorous way. Among the topics included in the series are the Higgs Boson, Anti-matter, the nature of Neutrinos, the concepts of the Big Bang, Cosmic Inflation, the Multiverse and Supersymmetry.

In recent years, he has been heavily involved in research using the DZero detector at the Fermilab Tevatron and also at the Compact Muon Solenoid (Content Management System) on the Large Hadron Collider at European Organization of Nuclear Research. His popularizations also include columns that translate Content Management System (monthly) and DZero (biweekly) physics measurements for the public. He is also the author of a recurring segment, Physics in a Nutshell, in the Fermilab online newspaper and blogs for the television show NOVA website.

Additionally, he has created several videos that translate particle physics and cosmology for a lay audience.

Achievements

• Lincoln is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and he received the 2013 European Physical Society HEPP Outreach award for “for communicating in multiple media the excitement of High Energy Physics to high-school students and teachers, and the public at large”.

Membership

He has coauthored hundreds of research papers and, more recently, was a member of the team finding evidence for the Higgs boson.