Leon M. Lederman (Illinois), winner of the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physics, was born in 1922 in New York City, the child of parents who emigrated from the Soviet Union. The first in his family to go to college, Lederman studied chemistry at the City College of New York and, after serving for three years in the Army, enrolled at Columbia to study physics. After receiving his Ph.D. in 1951, he taught at Columbia for 28 years. Lederman came of age in the heyday of particle physics and was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work on neutrinos, elementary particles whose speed and lack of electrical charge made them extremely difficult to detect and study. Lederman and fellow physicists Melvin Schwartz and Jack Steinberger were the first to show that more than one kind of neutrino existed. He served as the director of the Nevis Labs and the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, where he oversaw the construction of the first superconducting synchrotron, the highest energy accelerator in the world. In addition to the Nobel Prize, he has received the National Medal of Science and the Wolf Prize for Physics, among many other awards. More recently, Lederman has delved into science education: kids, he says, “are born scientists.”