Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory conducts unclassified scientific research on behalf of the United States Department of Energy.

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is a national laboratory that conducts unclassified scientific research on behalf of the United States Department of Energy. Berkeley Lab is a member of the national laboratory system supported by the U.S. Department of Energy through its Office of Science. It is managed by the University of California (UC) and is charged with conducting unclassified research across a wide range of scientific disciplines. Located on a 200-acre site in the hills above the UC Berkeley campus, Berkeley Lab employs approximately 4,200 scientists, engineers, support staff, and students. The Lab is also responsible for creating 5,600 jobs locally and 12,000 nationally. The overall economic impact on the national economy is estimated at $1.6 billion a year. Technologies developed at Berkeley Lab have generated billions of dollars in revenues, and thousands of jobs. Berkeley Lab was founded in 1931 by Ernest Orlando Lawrence, a UC Berkeley physicist who won the 1939 Nobel Prize in physics for his invention of the cyclotron, a circular particle accelerator that opened the door to high-energy physics.