After high school he enrolled atStanford University, where he was to meet his future wife, Celeste Landry. As an undergraduate he earned money as an assistant in the variouslow-temperature physics groups on campus. He was doing well both in his courses and his jobs in the labs and seemed set for a career in physics. He however doubted whether he wished to pursue such a career, or rather a different one in literature or politics. Halfway through his undergraduate years he went toChina andTaiwan for nine months to volunteer teaching conversational English and to studyChinese. He returned to Stanford with the intent to study physics. He graduated with honors and distinction in 1985.[1]
For graduate school he returned to MIT. There he joinedDavid Pritchard's group, which had a running experiment that tried to measure the mass of theelectron neutrino from thebeta decay oftritium. Although he was unable to determine themass of the neutrino, Cornell did obtain his PhD in 1990.[1]
Cornell married Celeste Landry in 1995 mere months before the BEC experiment succeeded. Their first daughter was born in 1996, and their second daughter in 1998.[1]
In October 2004, his left arm and shoulder were amputated in an attempt to stop the spread ofnecrotizing fasciitis. He was discharged from the hospital in mid-December, having recovered from the infection, and returned to work part-time in April 2005.[4] Cornell has run in theBolder Boulder several times since moving to Boulder in 1990, most recently in 2022.[5]
Eric Allin Cornell on Nobelprize.org including the Nobel Lecture December 8, 2001Bose-Einstein Condensation in a Dilute Gas; The First 70 Years and Some Recent Experiments
