John Bardeen was an American physicist and electrical engineer. John Bardeen was born in Madison, Wisconsin, on May 23, 1908. He studied Electrical Engineering at the University of Wisconsin, receiving a B.S. in 1928 and an M.S. in 1929. Bardeen studied both mathematics and physics as a graduate student, ending up writing his thesis on a problem in solid-state physics, under physicist Eugene Wigner. Before completing his thesis, he was offered a position as Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows at Harvard University in 1935. He spent the next three years there, from 1935 to 1938, working with Nobel laureate physicist John Hasbrouck van Vleck and to-be laureate Percy Williams Bridgman on problems in cohesion and electrical conduction in metals, and also did some work on level density of nuclei. He received his Ph.D. in mathematical physics from Princeton in 1936. In 1965, he received the National Medal Of Science.