Murray Gell-Mann, Ph.D.

Recipient of the 1969 Nobel Prize in physics for his work on the theory of elementary particles, he is currently Distinguished Fellow and co-chairman of the Science Board at the Santa Fe Institute (which he helped to found) as well as the Robert Andrews Millikan Professor Emeritus at the California Institute of Technology, where he joined the faculty in 1955. He has been a consultant to the Los Alamos National Laboratory since 1956. Gell-Mann's seminal contributions to physics include his “eightfold way” scheme, which brought order out of the chaos created by the discovery of some 100 kinds of particles in collisions involving atomic nuclei, and the theory of quarks, the fundamental building blocks of nuclear particles. Gell-Mann shared the 1989 Ettore Majorana Science for Peace Prize and was one of the first group selected by the United Nations Environment Program for its Honor Roll of Environmental Achievement.