About James Bjorken
James Daniel "BJ" Bjorken was an American theoretical physicist. He was a Putnam Fellow in 1954, received a BS in physics from MIT in 1956, and obtained his PhD from Stanford University in 1959. Bjorken was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in the fall of 1962. He was also emeritus professor in the SLAC Theory Group at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, and was a member of the Theory Department of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (1979–1989). Bjorken was awarded the Dirac Medal of the ICTP in 2004; and, in 2015, the Wolf Prize in Physics and the EPS High Energy and Particle Physics Prize. Bjorken also discovered the Bjorken sum rule, the prototypical QCD spin sum rule. Bjorken was also among the first to point out the phenomena of jet quenching in heavy ion collisions in 1982. The predictions of Bjorken scaling were confirmed in the early late 1960s electroproduction experiments at SLAC, in which quarks were seen for the first time.
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