Leon Max Lederman (July 15, 1922 - ) is an American experimental physicist and Nobel Prize in Physics laureate for his work with neutrinos. He is Director Emeritus of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois, USA. He founded the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy and has served in the capacity of Resident Scholar since 1998.
Lederman received received a Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1951. He joined the Columbia faculty and eventually became Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics. He took an extended leave of absence from Columbia in 1979 to become Fermilab's director. He resigned from Columbia and Fermilab in 1989 and taught briefly at the University of Chicago before moving to the Illinois Institute of Technology, serving as the Pritzker Professor of Science.
Among his achievements are the discovery of the muon neutrino in 1962 and the bottom quark in 1977. These helped establish his reputation as among the top particle physicists. In 1988, Lederman received the Nobel Prize for Physics along with Melvin Schwartz and Jack Steinberger "for the neutrino beam method and the demonstration of the doublet structure of the leptons through the discovery of the muon neutrino". Lederman received the National Medal of Science (1965), the Elliott Cresson Medal for Physics (1976), the Wolf Prize for Physics (1982) and the Enrico Fermi Award (1992). A former president of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Lederman also received the National Medal of Science, the Wolf Prize and the Ernest O. Lawrence Medal.
He is the author of the book, "The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question?"