Don Lincoln

Lincoln was born in 1964.⁠[1]

He says he grew up in a very small rural town in the northeastern United States; his father was a mechanic who did not finish high school and his mother worked in factories. As a youth he worked as a short-order cook, gas station attendant and factory worker.⁠[2]

He has said that neither of his parents had an academic background and that the science popularizers of the 1970s, such as Isaac Asimov and Carl Sagan, got him interested in science.⁠[3]

He graduated cum laude from the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology with two degrees, in mathematics and physics, and then studied experimental particle physics at Rice University under Marj Corcoran.⁠[2]

He received his master’s degree in physics from Rice in 1990 and his PhD in 1994.⁠[4]

His doctoral research was done at Fermilab, scattering the world’s highest-energy photon beam.⁠[5]

He recalls that his thesis experiment was a small fixed-target jet-photoproduction experiment in which he built the apparatus and wrote the data acquisition and all of the analysis software.⁠[6]

On March 2, 1995, Fermilab announced that the CDF and DZero collaborations had each observed the top quark, the last undiscovered of the six quarks predicted by theory.⁠[7]

He held postdoctoral appointments at the University of MichiganUniversity of MichiganThe University of Michigan is a university founded in Detroit in 1817 that moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1837; it is governed by a statewide-elected Board of Regents and also has campuses in Dearborn and Flint.Open the full entry and Fermilab and joined the Fermilab scientific staff in 1999.⁠[1]

In 2004 World Scientific published his first book, Understanding the Universe: From Quarks to the Cosmos, which introduces particle physics and how it is done to non-specialist readers.⁠[8]

In 2008 he joined the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a collaboration of about 3,000 scientists.⁠[5]

In 2009 Johns Hopkins University Press published his The Quantum Frontier: The Large Hadron Collider, with a foreword by Leon Lederman, a book of under 200 pages introducing the LHC and its experiments.⁠[9]

He recalls that he had been writing for Fermilab Today and kept suggesting videos; his first video, on the Higgs boson, came out in July 2011 and has since drawn more than three million views.⁠[6]

On July 4, 2012, CERN announced that the ATLAS and CMS experiments had observed a new particle in the mass region around 125–126 GeV, consistent with the long-sought Higgs boson.⁠[10]

He points to the 1995 discovery of the top quark by the DZero experiment and the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson by the CMS experiment as his two most noteworthy scientific accomplishments.⁠[11]

In May 2013 Lincoln, then an adjunct professor at Notre Dame, was named recipient of the 2013 Outreach Prize of the European Physical Society’s High Energy Physics Division for communicating the excitement of high energy physics to students, teachers and the public; it was presented that July at a conference in Stockholm.⁠[12]

The same year Johns Hopkins University Press published his Alien Universe: Extraterrestrial Life in Our Minds and in the Cosmos, whose first half examines popular images of aliens and whose second half explores the scientific possibility of advanced alien civilizations.⁠[13]

In 2014 Johns Hopkins University Press published his The Large Hadron Collider: The Extraordinary Story of the Higgs Boson and Other Stuff That Will Blow Your Mind, an insider’s history of why the LHC was built, how it works and what it has revealed.⁠[14]

In December 2016 he was named a 2016 Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science for contributions to experimental high energy physics, especially quantum chromodynamics, and to particle physics outreach; he was then a guest professor of physics at Notre Dame.⁠[11]

On April 12, 2017, the American Institute of Physics announced him as winner of the 2017 Andrew Gemant Award for contributions to the cultural and humanistic dimension of physics; the committee cited “over 20 years of enthusiastic and tireless communication.”⁠[3]

For more than a decade he wrote weekly Fermilab Today columns, wrote for Scientific American and The Physics Teacher among others, and developed a Theory of Everything course for the Great Courses series.⁠[4]

In 2023 Oxford UniversityUniversity of OxfordThe University of Oxford is a university in Oxford, England, where teaching existed in some form by 1096; it describes itself as the oldest university in the English-speaking world and is organised as a federal system of the university and dozens of self-governing colleges.Open the full entry Press published his Einstein’s Unfinished Dream: Practical Progress Towards a Theory of Everything, a 322-page hardcover.⁠[15]

The American Association of Physics Teachers gave him its 2024 Klopsteg Memorial Lecture Award; by then he had presented more than 150 videos for Fermilab’s YouTube channel, which had over 770,000 subscribers and 74 million views.⁠[16]

The American Physical Society gave him its 2024 Dwight Nicholson Medal for Outreach for worldwide presentations and publications that educate students and general audiences on the meaning of fundamental scientific research.⁠[17]

On May 29, 2026, he appeared on episode 497 of the Lex FridmanLex FridmanLex Fridman is a Soviet-born, US-raised computer scientist and podcast host who works as an MIT research scientist on human-AI interaction and autonomous driving. His Lex Fridman Podcast is known for hours-long conversations with guests including heads of state and technology leaders.Open the full entry Podcast, titled around the biggest mysteries in physics such as antimatter, dark energy and a theory of everything, with segments on unifying the laws of nature, particle colliders, the Higgs boson discovery and dark matter.⁠[18]

As of October 2026 his website describes him as a senior scientist at Fermilab and former adjunct professor of physics at Notre Dame who has co-authored more than 1,700 papers, is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the AAAS, and has written for CNNCNNCNN (Cable News Network) is an Atlanta-based news organization founded by Ted Turner on June 1, 1980, as the world’s first 24-hour television news channel. It has been owned in turn by Turner Broadcasting System, Time Warner, AT&T and Warner Bros. Discovery, became part of Skydance Corporation along with Warner Bros. Discovery in October 2026, and is one of the five networks that rotate in the White House television pool.Open the full entry, Big Think, Scientific American, NOVA and LiveScience.⁠[1]

He also made the Subatomic Stories video series for Fermilab’s YouTube channel, and has recorded Great Courses classes including Great Unanswered Questions of Modern Physics, A Theory of Everything, Understanding the Misconceptions of Science and The Evidence for Modern Physics, and has given TEDx and TED-Ed talks.⁠[19]

Personal website: Public link: https://drdonlincoln.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[18]

X: Public account: https://x.com/DrDonLincoln (opens in a new window)⁠[18]

Fermilab: Official website: https://www.fnal.gov/ (opens in a new window)⁠[18]