American physicist and winner, with John Bardeen (Bardeen, John) and Leon N. Cooper (Cooper, Leon N.), of the 1972 Nobel Prize for Physics for developing the BCS theory (for their initials), the first successful microscopic theory of superconductivity.

Schrieffer was educated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where he received his Ph.D. in 1957. He was a young graduate student working under Bardeen at the University of Illinois when he helped explain why metals lose their electrical resistance at very low temperatures.

Schrieffer taught at the University of Chicago (1957–59) and the University of Illinois (1959–62) before joining the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, where in 1964 he was named Mary Amanda Wood professor of physics. Schrieffer was Andrew D. White professor at large at Cornell University (1969–75) and from 1980 was professor of physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He published Theory of Superconductivity in 1964.