Jack Steinberger was born on May 25, 1921 in Bad Kissingen, Bavaria, Germany. He was married to Cynthia Alff and Joan Beauregard. He died on December 12, 2020 in Geneva, Switzerland.
He earned a chemistry degree from the University of Chicago. During WWII, the Army sent him to the radiation laboratory at MIT, where radar was being developed. He received his PhD from Chicago after the war.
He was a co-winner of the 1988 Nobel Prize in physics for producing beams of neutrinos and for demonstrating the existence of two types of neutrino. His co-laureates were Leon Lederman and Melvin Schwartz. The prizewinning research was conducted at Columbia University and the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York. He spent the latter part of his career at the CERN research center in Switzerland.
In 1934, he and his older brother were sent to the US, part of an American organization's volunteer effort to rescue Jewish children from the Nazi government. They lived with a foster family until the rest of their family came over four years later.