Don Lincoln

Don Lincoln (born 1964) is an American physicist, author, and science communicator. He conducts research in particle physics at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and is an adjunct professor of physics at the University of Notre Dame. He received a Ph.D. in experimental particle physics from Rice University in 1994. In 1995, he was a codiscoverer of the top quark. He has coauthored hundreds of research papers and, more recently, was a member of the team that discovered the Higgs boson in 2012. Lincoln is a public speaker and science writer and has contributed many science articles in magazines that include Analog Science Fiction and Fact in July 2009, Scientific American in November 2012 and July 2015, and The Physics Teacher at least six times. 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 (CMS) on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. His popularizations also include columns that translate CMS (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. In 2017, in collaboration with The Teaching Company, he released a video course that outlined the scientific community's modern understanding of a theory or everything. Lincoln is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and he received the 2013 European Physical Society HEPP Outreach award “for communicating in multiple media the excitement of High Energy Physics to high-school students and teachers, and the public at large”. He also was awarded the 2017 American Institute of Physics Gemant Award for "cultural, artistic or humanistic contributions to physics for achievements in communication and public outreach".