Albert W. Overhauser (August 17, 1925 – December 10, 2011) was an American physicist and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He is best known for his theory of dynamic nuclear polarization, also known as the Overhauser Effect.

Born in San Diego, California, Overhauser attended high school in San Francisco at Lick-Wilmerding High School and began his undergraduate work at the University of California, Berkeley in 1942. He interrupted his studies during World War II for a two year stint in the U.S. Navy Reserve, then returned to Berkeley to complete his education. In 1948 he received undergraduate degrees in physics and mathematics, and in 1951 he received a Ph.D. in physics.

From 1951 to 1953, he was a post-doctoral student at the University of Illinois, where he developed an important theory on the transfer of spin polarization; once the theory had been confirmed and demonstrated by other scientists, it became known as the Overhauser Effect. He was on the faculty at Cornell University from 1953 to 1958, and then left to join the research staff at Ford Motor Company. Overhauser remained at Ford until 1973, when he joined the faculty at Purdue University. He remained at Purdue as the Stuart Distinguished Professor of Physics for the rest of his career. Overhauser died in 2011 in West Lafayette, Indiana. He was 86.

John Joseph Hopfield (born July 15, 1933, Chicago, Illinois) is an American scientist most widely known for his invention of an associative neural network in 1982. It is now more commonly known as the Hopfield Network.

John Hopfield received his BA from Swarthmore College, and a Ph.D in physics from Cornell University in 1958. He spent two years in the theory group at Bell Laboratories, and subsequently was a faculty member at University of California, Berkeley (physics), Princeton University (physics), California Institute of Technology (Chemistry and Biology) and now again at Princeton, where he is the Howard A. Prior Professor of Molecular Biology. For 35 years, he also continued a strong connection with Bell Laboratories.

In 1986 he was a co-founder of the Computation and Neural Systems PhD program at Caltech.

He was awarded the Dirac Medal of the ICTP in 2002 for his interdisciplinary contributions to understanding biology as a physical process, including the proofreading process in biomolecular synthesis and a description of collective dynamics and computing with attractors in neural networks, and the Oliver Buckley Prize of the American Physical Society for work on the interactions between light and solids. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was the President of the American Physical Society in 2006.