Laureate Lecture - Dr. Carl Wieman
Wednesday, April 8, 2026
11:00am-12:00pm in The Pointe Conference Center
Every year the College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics (CNSM) Student Council invites a laureate to the Cal State Long Beach campus to speak to our students, faculty, staff, and community.
Our Laureate Lecturer for 2026 is Dr. Carl Wieman, who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2001 "for the achievement of Bose-Einstein condensation in dilute gases of alkali atoms, and for early fundamental studies of the properties of the condensates."
All are welcome to attend.
Lecture: Learning (and teaching) to think like skilled scientists
Abstract: The primary goal of university education in science and engineering is to have students develop expertise, the ability to think like skilled scientists and engineers. I will discuss how research on both the development of expertise and the nature of technical expertise can provide guidance for more effective learning and teaching in science. I will show examples of implementing these ideas in courses, and the data obtained on results. The talk will also touch on the role AI can and cannot play in a modern education.
About Dr. Carl Wieman
"Carl Wieman holds a joint appointment as Professor of Physics and of the Graduate School of Education. He has done extensive experimental research in atomic and optical physics. His current intellectual focus is now on undergraduate physics and science education. He has pioneered the use of experimental techniques to evaluate the effectiveness of various teaching strategies for physics and other sciences, and served as Associate Director for Science in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy."
-from Carl Wieman - Stanford Physics Department
About the Nobel Prize Work
"One of the fundamental numbers in the world of quantum mechanics is the spin quantum number. Particles and atoms that have whole-number spin are described by other rules and equations than those that have half-number spin. Satyendra Nath Bose and Albert Einstein predicted in 1924 that at very low temperatures atoms with whole-number spin would be able to concentrate themselves in the lowest energy state and form a Bose-Einstein condensate. In 1995 Carl Wieman and Eric Cornell succeeded in proving the phenomenon in a rarefied gas of rubidium atoms at an extremely low temperature."
-from Carl E. Wieman – Facts. NobelPrize.org
Past Laureate Lecturers
A laureate has been invited to speak to the Cal State Long Beach campus nearly every year since 1976. A list of these guest speakers can be found on CNSM Laureate Lecturer Series archive.
The series was originally named the Nobel Laureate Lecturer Series, but in 2023 the scope was expanded to include other prestigious awards; this has enabled the CNSM Student Council to invite professionals from a more diverse range of fields.
