Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
LBNL overlooking the Berkeley central campus and San Francisco Bay
(Image of old Berkeley Radiation Laboratory)
The Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), formerly the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory and usually shortened to Berkeley Lab is a U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory in Berkeley, California conducting unclassified scientific research. It is managed and owned by the University of California.
The site consists of 76 buildings located on 183 acres on the hills of the University of California, Berkeley campus. Altogether, it has some 4,000 employees, of which about 800 are students. Each year, the Lab also hosts more than 2,000 participating guests.
The Laboratory includes 15 divisions that are organized within the areas of Computing Sciences, Energy Sciences, Biosciences, General Sciences, and Resources and Operations. Many research projects are staffed and supported by multiple divisions, with computational and engineering integrated across the biosciences, general sciences and energy sciences.
Ernest Orlando Lawrence founded this Lab, the oldest of the national laboratories, in 1931. It was moved to its present site in 1940. Since its inception, nine researchers at this Lab (Ernest Lawrence, Glenn T. Seaborg, Edwin M. McMillan, Owen Chamberlain, Emilio G. Segrč, Donald A. Glaser, Melvin Calvin, Luis W. Alvarez, and Yuan T. Lee) have been awarded the Nobel Prize.
