Ernest Orlando Lawrence was born in South Dakota and educated at University of South Dakota, University of Minnesota and Yale. In 1928, he joined the faculty at University of California, Berkeley. Two years later, at the same time he received his first Research Corporation grant, he was made a full professor.
Lawrence was the inventor of the cyclotron, an accelerator of subatomic particles. For that achievement, he was awarded the 1939 Nobel Prize in physics. The Radiation Laboratory he developed at Berkeley during the 1930s helped usher in the era of “big science,” in which experiments were no longer done by individual researchers, but were, instead, conducted by large groups in entire buildings full of sophisticated equipment and huge scientific instruments.
Lawrence received a patent for the cyclotron in 1934 and assigned its management to Research Corporation. During World War II, Lawrence and his accelerators contributed to the Manhattan Project and he later played a leading role in establishing the system of national laboratories in the U.S.
In his 1938 Report on Research to RC, Lawrence noted, “It is my pleasant duty to express on behalf of all of us in the Radiation Laboratory our sincere gratitude to Research Corporation, whose steadfast support from the beginning has been a vital factor in our work.” Research Corporation continued supporting Lawrence’s work through 1942.