Physicists and astronomers

Lars Bildsten

Lars Bildsten is an American theoretical astrophysicist who directs the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at UC Santa Barbara and studies stellar explosions and gravitational waves.

Lars Bojer Madsen (born 1970) is a Danish theoretical physicist and professor at Aarhus University, known for strong-field ionization theory and attosecond physics, elected an American Physical Society Fellow in 2018.

Lars Hernquist

Lars Hernquist is a theoretical astrophysicist, the Mallinckrodt Professor at the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian, known for galaxy-formation simulations including Illustris and IllustrisTNG, and a 2020 Gruber Cosmology Prize recipient.

Lars Onsager

Lars Onsager was a Norwegian-born physical chemist and theoretical physicist who won the 1968 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his reciprocal relations in irreversible thermodynamics.

Lars Vegard

Lars Vegard (1880–1963) was a Norwegian physicist, professor at Kristiania/Oslo from 1918 to 1952, known for Vegard's law on mixed crystals and for identifying over 500 auroral spectral lines.

Latha Venkataraman

Latha Venkataraman is an applied physicist and chemist known for single-molecule electronics, formerly Lawrence Gussman Professor at Columbia University and a professor at IST Austria since 2025.

Laura Barge

Laura Barge, also known as Laurie Barge, is an American astrobiologist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory who studies the origin of life on Mars and ocean worlds.

Laura Fields

Laura Fields is an experimental particle physicist at the University of Notre Dame who studies how neutrino beams are produced and oscillate, and received a 2025 PECASE award.

Laura Greene (physicist)

Laura Greene is an American experimental condensed matter physicist known for tunneling spectroscopy of unconventional superconductors and Chief Scientist of the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory.

Laura Herz

Laura Herz (Laura M. Herz) is a semiconductor photophysicist and Professor of Physics at Oxford, elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and awarded the 2024 Michael Faraday Medal.

Laura Na Liu

Laura Na Liu is a physicist working in nanophotonics and DNA-origami plasmonics, and professor and director of the 2nd Physics Institute at the University of Stuttgart since 2020.

Laurens D. A. Siebbeles

Laurens D. A. Siebbeles, an honorary Antoni van Leeuwenhoek professor, leads the Opto-electronic Materials group at TU Delft, where his ultrafast spectroscopy studies showed efficient carrier multiplication in lead chalcogenide nanosheets.

Laurens Molenkamp

Laurens Molenkamp is a Dutch condensed matter physicist, professor at the University of Würzburg since 1999, known for the first observation of the quantum spin Hall effect in 2007.

Lawrence Bragg

Lawrence Bragg, also known as William Lawrence Bragg, was an Australian-born British physicist and X-ray crystallographer who shared the 1915 Nobel Prize in Physics with his father, William Henry Bragg.

Lawrence H. Aller

Lawrence H. Aller (1913–2003) was an American astronomer who specialized in the chemical analysis of planetary nebulae and stellar atmospheres, and a UCLA professor from 1962.

Lawrence M. Krauss

Lawrence M. Krauss is a theoretical physicist and cosmologist who taught at Yale, Case Western Reserve, and Arizona State, predicted dark energy in 1995, and wrote A Universe from Nothing.

Lawrence R. Hafstad

Lawrence R. Hafstad (1904–1993) was an American nuclear physicist who helped demonstrate uranium fission in 1939, proved the radar proximity fuze feasible, and led the Atomic Energy Commission's reactor program.

Lea Nienhaus

Lea Nienhaus is a chemist known for solid-state perovskite-sensitized photon upconversion, turning infrared light into visible light; she has been an associate professor at Rice University since 2024.

Lee Alvin DuBridge

Lee Alvin DuBridge was an American experimental physicist and founding director of the MIT Radiation Laboratory during World War II, and president of Caltech from 1946 to 1969.

Lee Grodzins

Lee Grodzins (1926–2025) was an American nuclear physicist who co-measured the neutrino's helicity, taught at MIT for 40 years, and co-founded the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Lee Hartmann

Lee Hartmann is an American astronomer at the University of Michigan who studies star and planet formation, elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2024.

Lei Xing

Lei Xing is a medical physicist at Stanford University who directs its Medical Physics Division, leads the Xing Laboratory, and works on artificial intelligence, imaging, and radiation oncology.

Leigh Canham

Leigh Canham (Leigh Trevor Canham) is a British solid state physicist who showed in 1990 that porous silicon emits visible red light, and later that silicon can be medically biodegradable.

Leland John Haworth

Leland John Haworth (1904–1979) was an American experimental physicist who directed Brookhaven National Laboratory from 1948 to 1961 and the National Science Foundation from 1963 to 1969.

Lene V. Hau

Lene V. Hau, also known as Lene Vestergaard Hau, is a Danish physicist at Harvard who led experiments slowing light to 17 m/s in 1999 and stopping it in 2001.

Lennard Fisk

Lennard Fisk is an American space physicist at the University of Michigan, known for his 1974 theory of anomalous cosmic rays and his service as a NASA associate administrator.

Lennart Lindegren

Lennart Lindegren, born 1950 in Sweden, is a Swedish astronomer at Lund Observatory who established the data-reduction methods for ESA's Hipparcos and Gaia missions, sharing the 2022 Shaw Prize in Astronomy.

Lennox Cowie

Lennox Cowie is a British astronomer at the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy, known for deep Keck surveys of faint galaxies and work on the submillimetre background.

Leo Blitz

Leo Blitz (1945–2022) was an American radio astronomer, emeritus professor at UC Berkeley, and director of its Radio Astronomy Laboratory, known for work on molecular clouds and black-hole masses.