Bruce Winstein was born in Los Angeles on September 25, 1943. He studied at UCLA as an undergraduate, before receiving his doctorate in physics from California Institute of Technology in 1970. After two years of post-doctoral studies at the Max Planck Institute in Munich, Winstein was appointed a senior research associate at the University of Chicago. He was named assistant professor in 1976 and later became the Samuel K. Allison Distinguished Service Professor in Physics.
Winstein was heavily involved with work at Fermilab in Illinois, leading the long-running KTeV experiment, which in 1999 provided the first evidence of direct CP violation, proving a long running hypothesis held in particle physics. Its results implied that the direction of time is an innate property of the universe. In recognition of his work on KTeV, Winstein was awarded the Panofsky Prize in Experimental Physics in 2007.
After the publication of the KTeV data, Winstein shifted his field of research from particle physics to cosmology. He spent the 1999-2000 academic year in Princeton studying the polarization of the cosmic background radiation. This change of research interest also led Winstein to help found the Center for Cosmological Physics, now known as the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics. In cosmology, Winstein founded the QUIET collaboration in attempt to determine minute changes in the polarization of the cosmic background radiation. In all of his scientific endeavors, Winstein was a champion of “blind analysis”, the concept that experimenters should intentionally conceal results while analyzing data to avoid being biased by their preconceptions.
Winstein was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1995, and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2007. He died on February 28, 2011.
From the guide to the Winstein, Bruce. Papers, 1960-2010, (Special Collections Research Center University of Chicago Library 1100 East 57th Street Chicago, Illinois 60637 U.S.A.)
