Cooper, Leon Neil, 1930–, American neuroscientist, b. New York City, Ph.D. Columbia, 1954. Cooper was a researcher at the Univ. of Illinois from 1955 to 1957 and at Ohio State Univ. from 1957 to 1958, when he joined the faculty at Brown, where he is now director of the Institute for Brain and Neural Systems. Cooper, John Bardeen, and John Schrieffer were awarded the 1972 Nobel Prize in Physics for their jointly developed theory of superconductivity, now known as the BCS Theory. Although superconductivity was first described by Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes in 1911, its underlying mechanism was not understood until the three scientists provided a complete theoretical explanation of the phenomenon in 1957.
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