Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory


Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is a federally funded research and development center in the hills of Berkeley, California, United States. Established in 1931 by the University of California, the laboratory is sponsored by the United States Department of Energy and administered by the UC system. Ernest Lawrence, who won the Nobel prize for inventing the cyclotron, founded the lab and served as its director until his death in 1958. Located in the Berkeley Hills, the lab overlooks the campus of the University of California, Berkeley.

Scientific research

The mission of Berkeley Lab is to bring science solutions to the world. The research at Berkeley Lab has four main themes: discovery science, energy, earth systems, and the future of science. The Laboratory's 22 scientific divisions are organized within six areas of research: Computing Sciences, Physical Sciences, Earth and Environmental Sciences, Biosciences, Energy Sciences, and Energy Technologies. Lab founder Ernest Lawrence believed that scientific research is best done through teams of individuals with different fields of expertise, working together, and his laboratory still considers that a guiding principle today.

Research impact

Berkeley Lab scientists have won fifteen Nobel prizes in physics and chemistry, and each one has a street named after them on the Lab campus. 23 Berkeley Lab employees were contributors to reports by the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which shared the Nobel Peace Prize. Fifteen Lab scientists have also won the National Medal of Science, and two have won the National Medal of Technology and Innovation. 82 Berkeley Lab researchers have been elected to membership in the National Academy of Sciences or the National Academy of Engineering.
In 2022, Berkeley Lab had the greatest research publication impact of any single government laboratory in the world in physical sciences and chemistry, as measured by Nature Index. The only institutions with higher ranking were national government research agencies for China, France, and Italy which are network of research laboratories or smaller research units. Using the same metric, the Lab is the second-ranking laboratory in the area of earth and environmental sciences.

Scientific user facilities

Much of Berkeley Lab's research impact is built on the capabilities of its unique research facilities.
The laboratory manages five national scientific user facilities, which are part of the network of 28 such facilities operated by the DOE Office of Science. These facilities and the expertise of the scientists and engineers who operate them are made available to 14,000 researchers from universities, industry, and government laboratories.
Berkeley Lab operates five major National User Facilities for the DOE Office of Science:
  1. The Advanced Light Source is a synchrotron light source with 41 beamlines providing ultraviolet, soft x-ray, and hard x-ray light to scientific experiments in a wide variety of fields, including materials science, biology, chemistry, physics, and the environmental sciences. The ALS is supported by the DOE Office of Basic Energy Sciences.
  2. The Joint Genome Institute is a scientific user facility for integrative genomic science, with particular emphasis on the DOE missions of energy and the environment. The JGI provides over 2,000 scientific users with access to the latest generation of genome sequencing and analysis capabilities.
  3. The Molecular Foundry is a multidisciplinary nanoscience research facility. Its seven research facilities focus on Imaging and Manipulation of Nanostructures, Nanofabrication, Theory of Nanostructured Materials, Inorganic Nanostructures, Biological Nanostructures, Organic and Macromolecular Synthesis, and Electron Microscopy.
  4. The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center is the mission scientific computing facility for the DOE Office of Science, providing high performance computing for over 11,000 scientists working on DOE research programs. NERSC celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2024 by making a video that describes significant events over that 50-year timeline. The Perlmutter system at NERSC was the 5th-ranked supercomputer system in the Top500 rankings when it came online in 2021. On May 29, 2025, the Secretary of Energy Chris Wright announced the signing of a contract with Dell to build the next generation of NERSC supercomputer. Joining Wright and Lab Director Michael Witherell at the announcement event were Jennifer Doudna, the Nobel-prize winning biochemist who the new system will be named after, and Jensen Huang, the CEO of NVIDIA. The Doudna system will be one of the first supercomputers to use the NVIDIA Rubin microarchitecture for GPUs when it launches in 2026.
  5. The Energy Sciences Network is a high-speed research network serving DOE scientists with their experimental facilities and collaborators worldwide. The upgraded network infrastructure launched in 2022 is optimized for very large scientific data flows, and the network transports roughly 35 petabytes of traffic each month.

    Team science

Much of the research at Berkeley Lab is done by researchers from several disciplines and multiple institutions working together as a large team focused on shared scientific goals. Berkeley is either the lead partner or one of the leads in several research institutes and hubs, including the following:
  1. The Joint BioEnergy Institute. JBEI's mission is to establish the scientific knowledge and new technologies needed to transform the maximum amount of carbon available in bioenergy crops into biofuels and bioproducts. JBEI is one of four U.S. Department of Energy Bioenergy Research Centers. In 2023, the DOE announced the commitment of $590M to support the BRCs for the next five years.
  2. The National Alliance for Water Innovation. NAWI aims to secure an affordable, energy-efficient, and resilient water supply for the US economy through decentralized, fit-for-purpose processing. NAWI is supported primarily by the DOE Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, partnering with the California Department of Water Resources, the California State Water Resources Control Board. Berkeley Lab is the lead partner, with founding partners Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
  3. The Liquid Sunlight Alliance. LiSA's Mission is to establish the science principles by which durable coupled microenvironments can be co-designed to efficiently and selectively generate liquid fuels from sunlight, water, carbon dioxide, and nitrogen. The lead institution for LiSA is the California Institute of Technology and Berkeley Lab is a major partner.
  4. The Energy Storage Research Alliance. The mission of the Energy Storage Research Alliance is to apply cutting-edge scientific tools and automation to accelerate materials discovery for next-generation energy storage technologies. Argonne National Laboratory leads the ESRA collaboration with Berkeley Lab and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory as co-leads.

    Cyclotron Road

Cyclotron Road is a fellowship program for technology innovators, supporting entrepreneurial scientists as they advance their own technology projects. The core support for the program comes from the Department of Energy's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, through the Lab-Embedded Entrepreneurship Program. Berkeley Lab manages the program in close partnership with Activate, a nonprofit organization established to scale the Cyclotron Road fellowship model to a greater number of innovators around the U.S. and the world. Cyclotron Road fellows receive two years of stipend, over $100,000 of research support, intensive mentorship and a startup curriculum, and access to the expertise and facilities of Berkeley Lab. Since members of the first cohort completed their fellowships in 2017, the 84 start-up companies founded by Cyclotron Road Fellows have raised over $2.5 billion in follow-on funding.

Notable scientists

Nobel laureates

Sixteen Berkeley Lab scientists have received the Nobel Prize in physics or chemistry.
PhysicsChemistry
John Clauser Omar Yaghi
Saul Perlmutter Carolyn Bertozzi
George Smoot Jennifer Doudna
Steven Chu Yuan T. Lee
Luis Alvarez Melvin Calvin
Donald Glaser Edwin McMillan
Owen Chamberlain Glenn Seaborg
Emilio Segrè
Ernest Lawrence

National Medals

Fifteen Berkeley Lab scientists have received the National Medal of Science and two have been awarded the National Medal of Technology and Innovation.
Paul Alivisatos Alexandre Chorin John Prausnitz
Gabor Somorjai Marvin Cohen Bruce Ames
Harold Johnston Darleane Hoffman Glenn Seaborg
Edwin McMillan Melvin Calvin Yuan T. Lee
George Pimentel Kenneth Pitzer Luis Alvarez

The National Medal of Technology and Innovation was awarded to Arthur Rosenfeld in 2011, to Ashok Gadgil in 2023, and to Jennifer Doudna in 2025.

History

From 1931 to 1945: cyclotrons and team science

The laboratory was founded on August 26, 1931, by Ernest Lawrence, as the Radiation Laboratory of the University of California, Berkeley, associated with the Physics Department. It centered physics research around his new instrument, the cyclotron, a type of particle accelerator for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1939. Throughout the 1930s, Lawrence pushed to create larger and larger machines for physics research, courting private philanthropists for funding. He was the first to develop a large team to build big projects to make discoveries in basic research. Eventually these machines grew too large to be held on the university grounds, and in 1940 the lab moved to its current site atop the hill above campus. Part of the team put together during this period includes two other young scientists who went on to direct large laboratories: J. Robert Oppenheimer, who directed Los Alamos Laboratory, and Robert Wilson, who directed Fermilab.
Leslie Groves visited Lawrence's Radiation Laboratory in late 1942 as he was organizing the Manhattan Project, meeting J. Robert Oppenheimer for the first time. Oppenheimer was tasked with organizing the nuclear bomb development effort and founded today's Los Alamos National Laboratory to help keep the work secret. At the RadLab, Lawrence and his colleagues developed the technique of electromagnetic enrichment of uranium using their experience with cyclotrons. The calutrons became the basic unit of the massive Y-12 facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Lawrence's lab helped contribute to what have been judged to be the three most valuable technology developments of the war. The cyclotron, whose construction was stalled during the war, was finished in November 1946. The Manhattan Project shut down two months later.