The Person Behind the Nobel Prize: Jan Hall

NIST Senior Fellow Emeritus John L. “Jan” Hall was born in Denver, Colorado, on August 21, 1934. His mother was an elementary school teacher and singer; his father was an electrical engineer who worked for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation on hydroelectric projects in the United States and abroad. 

One day in the 1940s, the family’s coal bin ran low, and the young Hall found his dad’s old radio electronics, left over from earlier days as a hobbyist, mired in black dust. With a salvaged car battery powering old vacuum tubes, Hall commenced his first, informal laboratory work. He later augmented this with what he calls “pyrotechnical studies” involving model rockets. 

Following high school in Denver, Hall won a scholarship from the Westinghouse company, and studied physics at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now part of Carnegie Mellon University) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, graduating in 1956.

He stayed on for his master’s and doctoral degrees, and did his thesis work studying the energy levels of hydrogen atoms locked in calcium fluoride crystals. Hall graduated with his Ph.D. in 1961, and joined NIST at its location in Washington, DC, as a National Research Council postdoctoral fellow that year. 

In March 1958, Hall married his sweetheart, Marilyn (Lindy). The two would go on to have three children.

In 1962, Hall moved to Boulder, Colorado, as a founding member of the new Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics (now JILA), a NIST-University of Colorado joint institute on the University of Colorado campus in Boulder.