Large group of individuals and media equipment surrounding Ernest Lawrence for a press interview.

Innovative Research

Lasting Impact

Inspiring Future Scientists

Listen to the recording of Ernest Lawrence’s Nobel Prize speech from the ceremony in Berkeley, February 29, 1940.

 Ernest Orlando Lawrence Lawrence sitting at the control table of the 27-inch cyclotron.

Berkeley Lab’s founder invented both the cyclotron and the modern team approach to big science.

 Light-haired person wearing a white shirt under a dark gray blazer.
  • Chemistry
  • 2022

Carolyn Bertozzi, a former Berkeley Lab scientist and Molecular Foundry director, is co-winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the development of click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry. She shares the Nobel Prize with Morten Meldal and K. Barry Sharpless. She is the eighth woman to be awarded the prize.

 White-haired person in a blue shirt sitting on a stool and holding a book.
  • Physics
  • 2008

Berkeley Lab astrophysicist Saul Perlmutter shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Brian P. Schmidt of the Australian National University and Adam G. Riess of Johns Hopkins University for the discovery — using observations of distant supernovae — that the expansion of the universe is not slowing down, as anticipated, but in fact is accelerating.

 Dark-haired person with glasses wearing a black suit and navy tie.
  • Physics
  • 2006

Smoot shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with John C. Mather of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center for their discovery of subtle irregularities in the cosmic microwave background radiation, the faint thermal afterglow from the Big Bang. These irregularities are thought to have led to the condensation of matter into gas clouds, stars, and galaxies as the universe expanded.