John Robert (“Bob”) Schrieffer, former Mary Amanda Wood Professor of Physics at the University of Pennsylvania and a 1972 Nobel Prize co-recipient for his team’s theory of superconductivity, died July 27 in his sleep in Tallahassee, Florida. He was 88.

Dr. Schrieffer was born in Oak Park, Illinois. After graduating from MIT in 1953 with a degree in physics, he went to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to work toward earning his PhD. There, he worked with physicists John Bardeen and Leon Cooper to develop a theory of superconductivity. Their “BCS” theory was published in 1957 and is considered the first successful microscopic theory of superconductivity.

After finishing his dissertation, he held various positions nationally and internationally before joining the physics department at Penn in 1962. In 1964, he was named the Mary Amanda Wood Professor of Physics. He was also a member of Penn’s Laboratory for the Research on the Structure of Matter (LRSM). In 1968, Dr. Schrieffer received the Oliver E. Buckley Solid State Physics Prize, and he, with Dr. Cooper, also received the National Academy of Sciences’ Comstock Prize, an award given every five years. In 1972, Drs. Schrieffer, Bardeen and Cooper received the Nobel Prize for Physics (Almanac October 24, 1972).

While at Penn, he received an honorary doctor of science, was named a University Scholar, was elected into the American Philosophical Society, and served as an Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large of Cornell.

In 1980, Dr. Schrieffer left Penn to join the University of California, Santa Barbara (Almanac October 4, 1979), where he served as director of the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, 1984-1989. In 1983 he was awarded the US National Medal of Science. He returned to Penn in 1985 to speak at LRSM’s 25th Anniversary Convocation.

In 1992, he joined the faculty at Florida State University and served as chief scientist of the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Tallahassee. In 2004, Dr. Schrieffer’s life took a turn when he was driving in California. His car, traveling at more than 100 mph, hit a van and killed one person and injured seven others. He was sentenced to two years in prison. He retired in 2006.

Dr. Schrieffer is survived by three children.