A physicist, John Bardeen was working with scientist Walter Brattain at AT&T's Bell Laboratories when they developed the first semiconductor transistor in 1947. It was a breakthrough moment, for the transistor replaced the large, inefficient vacuum tubes and paved the way for every electronic device created since the 1950s. Later adapted by William P. Shockley for wider use, the transistor earned the three men the 1956 Nobel Prize in physics.

The son of a dean of the medical school at the University of Wisconsin, Bardeen joined the faculty at the University of Illinois in 1951 and soon began the research that made him the first person to receive two Nobel Prizes in the same field.

In 1972, Bardeen was again a co-winner of the Nobel Prize in physics for the discovery of superconductivity, in which electricity travels with little or no resistance. A tremendous scientific achievement, the superconductivity theory took nearly two decades to develop. Bardeen's work was done with Leon Cooper and J. Robert Schrieffer.

Bardeen also served on the President's Science Advisory Committee (1959-62) and on the White House Science Council in the early 1980s. He won the National Medal of Science in 1965 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1976. Bardeen was married and had two sons and a daughter. He earned his B.S. and M.S. in electrical engineering at the University of Wisconsin and his Ph.D. in mathematical physics from Princeton in 1936.

The Sony Corp. endowed a $3 million faculty position at the University of Illinois in Bardeen's honor, noting, "Sony's achievements, from Japan's first transistor radio to the latest digital processors, owe a significant debt to the scientific contributions of Professor Bardeen."