David J. Wineland (born 1944) is an American physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) physics laboratory in Boulder. His work has included advances in optics, specifically laser cooling of ions in Paul traps and use of trapped ions to implement quantum computing operations.
Wineland received his bachelor's degree from the University of California, Berkeley in 1965 and his PhD in 1970 working under Norman Ramsey at Harvard University. He then worked as a postdoc in Hans Dehmelt's group at the University of Washington before joining the National Bureau of Standards in 1975 where he started the ion storage group, now at NIST, Boulder.
Wineland is a fellow of the American Physical society, the American Optical society, and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1992.
He was the recipient of the 1990 Davisson-Germer Prize in Atomic or Surface Physics, the 1990 William F. Meggers Award of the Optical Society of America, the 1996 Einstein Medal for Laser Science of the Society of Optical and Quantum electronics, the 1998 Rabi Award from the IEEE Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics, and Frequency Control Society,[1] the 2001 Arthur L. Schawlow Prize in Laser Science,[2] the 2007 National Medal of Science in the physical sciences,[3] the 2008 Herbert Walther Award from the OSA.,[4] and The Franklin Institute's 2010 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Physics with Juan Ignacio Cirac and Peter Zoller.