Leon N. Cooper was an American physicist and professor of Brown University. His name is associated with his work on superconductivity and neuroscience. He proposed the Cooper pair mechanism in 1956 and in 1972 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics with John Bardeen and John Robert Schrieffer for the development of the BCS theory of superconductivity. In neuroscience, Cooper co-developed the BCM theory of synaptic plasticity.