Nobel Laureate Scientist. J. Robert Schrieffer shared the 1972 Nobel Prize in Physics with fellow American physicists John Bardeen and Leon N. Cooper for jointly developing the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer or BCS theory, the first successful quantum theory of superconductivity. He attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to study mechanical engineering, but later changed his major to physics. He earned his bachelor's degree in physics in 1953, and later continued his studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, receiving a Ph.D. in 1957. He became a research assistant in the laboratory of John Bardeen, with the initial focus being surface physics. In 1956, he began to investigate superconductivity with Bardeen and Cooper, who also was an assistant in Bardeen's lab. After Cooper discovered that electrons in a superconducting material are attracted to one another and organize themselves into pairs, later known as Cooper pairs, he began seeking a mathematical description of their behavior. In early 1957, he developed the necessary equations, which considered the activity of all Cooper pairs simultaneously, rather than as individual pairs. Later that same year, the BCS theory, which describes superconductivity as a microscopic effect caused by a condensation of Cooper pairs into a boson-like state, was announced. It was this theory which later earned him, along with Bardeen and Cooper, the 1972 Nobel Prize in Physics. He published "Theory of Superconductivity" in 1964. He also earned several other awards for his research in this field. He held positions at various other universities. In 1969 he was appointed by Cornell to a six-year term as an Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large. In 1992 he was appointed University Professor at Florida State University and Chief Scientist of the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory. In 2005, he was sentenced to a two-year prison term after pleading no contest to vehicular homicide after an automobile accident, in which he was driving at age 74 with a suspended license. The accident resulted in the death of one man and several others injured and he served the full sentence. He married and had a son and two daughters. His parents had relocated in 1947 to Eustis, Florida where they became active in the citrus industry and where he graduated from high school. He died in a nursing home in Florida.