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Gregory S. Boebinger is the director of the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Tallahassee, Florida and a professor of physics at Florida State University.

The 6-foot 4-inch scientist, who frequently ends his written lab communications with "Rock 'n' roll," can often be seen at work in jeans and a bright tie-dye T-shirt bearing the Magnet Lab logo. Long-time colleague and physicist Al Migliori, a fellow of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, described Boebinger as an "energetic, honest and extremely intelligent" leader who is also a "wild man" as a scientist.

Since 2004, Boebinger has persistently lobbied the scientific community to build a unique, world-class laser - dubbed Big Light - at the 370,000-square-foot Magnet Lab. The free-electron laser would span the terahertz-to-visible-light part of the electromagnetic spectrum, probing a blind spot that scientists have yet to fully explore. The 4th-generation light source would be housed in a separate, specially-built facility beside the Mag Lab, at an estimated cost of $65 million.

Biography
Boebinger was born June 29, 1959 in Indianapolis, Indiana, one of four sons of a minister and an elementary school teacher. He's a 1977 graduate of North Central High School in Indianapolis. He married his high-school sweetheart; they have three children.

He simultaneously earned three bachelor's degrees - in physics, philosophy and electrical engineering - from Purdue University in 1981. He did graduate work in physics at Cambridge University, receiving a Certificate of Postgraduate Studies in 1982. His doctorate in physics came from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1986.

Part of Boebinger's doctoral work involved experiments with high-powered magnets at MIT's Francis Bitter Magnet Laboratory. It was there that he met two men who were regulars at the MIT lab and who would later win the 1998 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work with magnets and quantum effects: Horst Ludwig Störmer, then of Bell Laboratories, and Daniel Tsui, then a professor at Princeton University. Boebinger worked as their graduate assistant, and they advised him on his thesis.

Before taking the helm at the Magnet Lab in Tallahassee, Boebinger worked at New Mexico's Los Alamos National Laboratory from 1998 to 2004, first as the director of the Pulsed Magnetic Field Laboratory, and later as its deputy director for Science Programs in the Division of Material Science and Technology. In his earlier days, he worked as a member of the technical staff at Bell Laboratories and as a postdoctoral researcher at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, France.

Honors and Awards
Fellow of:

American Association for the Advancement of Science

American Physical Society

Fannie and John Hertz Foundation (MIT)

Karl Taylor Compton Foundation (MIT)

Winston Churchill Foundation

NATO Postdoctoral Fellowship (École Normale Supérieure)

Distinguished Science Alumnus: Purdue University School of Science