Nobel laureate Leon M. Lederman received the Compton Medal at the April 2005 meeting of the American Physical Society in Tampa, Florida.
Lederman, an internationally known high-energy physicist, has been actively involved in the professional development of primary-school teachers in the Chicago area. He is being recognized for his "inspirational leadership in the teaching of physics."
Director emeritus of Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, Lederman holds an appointment as Pritzker Professor of Science at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. He is also the resident scholar at the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy in Aurora. With colleagues and students, Lederman carried out many seminal experiments that provided advances in the understanding of fundamental particles and their interactions. His major work included the observation of parity violation in decay of pi mesons and muons, the discovery of the long-lived neutral kaon, the discovery that neutrinos come in at least two varieties, and the discovery of the heavy upsilon meson, which was the first evidence for the existence of the bottom quark.