Don Lincoln

Don Lincoln
Don Lincoln
Born	1964
Birthplace	New York City, New York, United States
Nationality	American
Occupation	Physicist, author, science communicator
Employer	Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
Known for	Co-discovery of the top quark; Higgs boson research; science popularization
Education	Ph.D., Rice University (1994)
Awards	Andrew Gemant Award (2017); APS Fellow (2015)

Don Lincoln (born 1964) is an American experimental particle physicist, author, and science communicator who serves as a senior scientist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois. A self-described "atom smasher," Lincoln has spent his career exploring the most fundamental constituents of matter while building a parallel reputation as one of the more prolific public explainers of modern physics in the United States. Lincoln participated in two of the most consequential experimental discoveries in modern physics: the 1995 detection of the top quark at Fermilab and the 2012 detection of the Higgs boson at CERN's Large Hadron Collider. Beyond the laboratory, he has authored books, video lectures, magazine columns, and the official YouTube programming for Fermilab, which together have made him a familiar face for general audiences seeking accessible accounts of particle physics, cosmology, and the work of Albert Einstein. His research at Fermilab has centered on quantum chromodynamics, searches for new physical phenomena, and the development of particle detector technology.

Early Life

Don Lincoln was born in 1964 in New York City, New York. Public information about his immediate family and childhood is limited, but he has spoken in interviews and essays about an early fascination with science. In a 2025 commentary in Physics Today defending the practice of science communication, Lincoln traced his interest in physics to childhood encounters with popular science media, noting that books, magazines, and television programs aimed at general audiences had shaped his decision to pursue research as a career. That experience, he has argued, gave him both a sense of the importance of accessible scientific writing and a personal model for the kind of outreach he would later undertake.

Lincoln has described his trajectory into particle physics as following from a more general childhood curiosity about how the physical world is assembled at its smallest scales, an interest he eventually channeled into formal study of experimental physics during his undergraduate years. Few additional details about his early life, primary education, or family background appear in published profiles, and Lincoln has generally kept those aspects of his biography out of public coverage, focusing public interviews on his scientific work and his views on outreach.

Education

Lincoln pursued his undergraduate studies at the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in Terre Haute, Indiana, earning a Bachelor of Science degree in physics. He has remained connected to Rose-Hulman as a prominent alumnus, and in 2025 the institute published a feature profile of his career in particle physics and science communication.

After Rose-Hulman, Lincoln enrolled in graduate study at Rice University in Houston, Texas, where he received both a Master of Arts and a Doctor of Philosophy in experimental particle physics. He completed his Ph.D. in 1994. His doctoral work was carried out in connection with experiments at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, where he would later spend his research career as a staff scientist.

Career

Research at Fermilab

Lincoln joined the scientific staff of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, the United States' flagship particle physics facility, and rose to the position of senior scientist. His research has centered on experimental particle physics, with a particular emphasis on quantum chromodynamics — the theory of the strong nuclear interaction — as well as searches for physical phenomena beyond the Standard Model and the development of particle detector technology. He has co-authored several hundred research papers as a member of large international collaborations operating at the energy frontier.

In 1995, Lincoln was a member of the DZero (DØ) experimental collaboration at Fermilab's Tevatron collider when the collaboration, together with the parallel CDF experiment, announced the discovery of the top quark. The top quark, the heaviest of the six quarks predicted by the Standard Model, had eluded experimental detection for nearly two decades before its observation at the Tevatron, and the discovery completed the third generation of quarks in the Standard Model. Lincoln's contributions to this and subsequent Fermilab measurements have been highlighted in the laboratory's internal "Result of the Week" and "Physics in a Nutshell" publications, which he has authored or contributed to on a recurring basis.

Higgs boson research at the LHC

In addition to his Tevatron work, Lincoln has been a member of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) collaboration at CERN's Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland. He was part of the experimental team that announced the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012, the long-predicted particle associated with the mechanism that gives mass to elementary particles in the Standard Model. Lincoln has subsequently authored Fermilab's "CMS Result of the Month" series, which summarizes new measurements from the CMS experiment for both physicist and general audiences. His research on the Higgs boson and on searches for additional particles and forces beyond the Standard Model has continued through the various run phases of the LHC.

Academic affiliation

For a period during his Fermilab career, Lincoln held an appointment as an adjunct professor of physics at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, where he was listed on the faculty roster of the physics department. He is no longer affiliated with Notre Dame, and his primary institutional home has remained Fermilab.

Science communication and writing

Alongside his experimental research, Lincoln has built a substantial body of work in science communication aimed at general readers, students, and educators. He has been a recurring contributor to Scientific American, where his author page hosts essays on topics ranging from particle physics and cosmology to the history of physics. He has also written regular columns for Live Science as part of its "Expert Voices" series and was a longtime blogger for the PBS program Nova, contributing posts on physics topics to the network's science blog.

Lincoln has produced video lecture courses for The Great Courses, including The Theory of Everything: The Quest to Explain All Reality, a series surveying attempts to unify the known fundamental forces of nature. He has also been the principal on-camera presenter for Fermilab's official YouTube channel, which features short explanatory videos on particle physics concepts, cosmology, and the work of the laboratory.

His books include popular treatments of particle physics, the Higgs boson, and the legacy of Albert Einstein. A 2022 review in American Scientist described his book on particle physics as taking general readers on a tour of the structure of matter and the current understanding of the universe from the standpoint of working experimental physicists. Lincoln has continued to publish for popular and educational audiences, with recent contributions including a 2026 article in The Physics Teacher examining experimental tests of whether antimatter falls under gravity in the same way as ordinary matter, as well as a 2025 Physics Today guide offering practical advice to scientists beginning their own outreach efforts.

Views on science communication

Lincoln has been an outspoken advocate for the practice of science communication by working researchers. In a 2025 Physics Today commentary titled "A defense of science communication," he argued that public engagement is a professional responsibility for publicly funded scientists and pushed back against critics who treat outreach as a distraction from research. In an April 2026 interview accompanying a paper he had authored on bringing contemporary physics into introductory classrooms, Lincoln described his pedagogical goal in vivid terms, telling AIP that by feeding students "the mysteries and wonder of modern physics" he hoped to "blow their minds" and draw them more deeply into the discipline. He has urged that introductory physics curricula incorporate material on the Standard Model, cosmology, and other twenty-first-century topics rather than confine students to classical mechanics and nineteenth-century electromagnetism.

Recognition

Lincoln has received several honors from professional physics organizations for both his research and his communication work. In 2015 he was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society through the Forum on Outreach and Engaging the Public, an APS unit that recognizes physicists who have made substantial contributions to the public communication of physics.

In 2017 he received the Andrew Gemant Award from the American Institute of Physics, an annual prize that recognizes "significant contributions to the cultural, artistic, or humanistic dimension of physics." The award citation acknowledged Lincoln's books, videos, lectures, and online writing aimed at communicating the science of particle physics and cosmology to general audiences, as well as his continued role as a working experimental physicist at Fermilab.

His articles in Scientific American, Live Science, Physics Today, and The Physics Teacher, along with his Fermilab YouTube programming, have given him a wide secondary readership outside the academic physics community. Profiles of Lincoln have appeared in alumni and institutional publications, including a 2025 feature by Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology marking his career as a particle physicist and public educator. His authority records are maintained by major library catalogues, including the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Virtual International Authority File, reflecting the international circulation of his published books.

Legacy

Lincoln's career illustrates the dual role increasingly occupied by senior researchers at large national laboratories, who are expected both to contribute to frontier experimental science and to communicate its results to the public that funds it. As a member of the DZero and CMS collaborations, he participated in two of the most significant experimental discoveries of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries — the top quark and the Higgs boson — discoveries that together completed substantial portions of the Standard Model of particle physics. His co-authorship of several hundred papers within these collaborations places him within the cohort of experimental physicists whose work defines the present understanding of the fundamental constituents of matter.

His written and recorded output for non-specialist audiences — books, magazine articles, Great Courses lecture series, Nova blog posts, and Fermilab's YouTube channel — has helped to establish a public idiom for discussing particle physics, the Higgs boson, dark matter, and the work of Albert Einstein. In his Physics Today commentaries and interviews, Lincoln has consistently articulated a model of the physicist-communicator in which outreach is integrated with, rather than separate from, ongoing experimental research.

His recognition by the American Physical Society and the American Institute of Physics, alongside his record of peer-reviewed publication, marks him as one of the comparatively small number of working physicists whose careers in research and in public communication have been honored independently by professional bodies in both areas. Through his continuing affiliation with Fermilab and his role in shaping the laboratory's public-facing materials, Lincoln has also contributed to the institutional identity of American particle physics during an era of evolving funding priorities and shifting frontiers between accelerator-based and astrophysical approaches to fundamental questions.

External links

• Don Lincoln Wants You to Understand Why Time Is Weirder Than You Think on ListenerReader
• Don Lincoln Has Spent 30 Years Looking for Dark Matter and Has Absolutely No Idea What It Is on ListenerReader