When he was an infant, his family moved to San Francisco then to Seattle, where he finished high school.
[2] After obtaining his PhD, Greenberg spent time at Harvard University for postdoctoral work.
[10] Then in 1970, John Woodland Hastings discovered that Aliivibrio fischeri produced light and became bioluminescent under high cell density but not in diluted concentration, a phenomenon known as autoinduction.
[15] In a seminal article in 1994, Greenberg, together with Claiborne (Clay) Fuqua and Stephen Winans, at the time both from Cornell University, coined the term quorum sensing to describe the behavior of autoinduced bioluminescence in A. fischeri and other bacterial species.
[16] Greenberg has also branched out from A. fischeri, collaborating with Barbara Iglewski at the University of Rochester to study quorum sensing in Pseudomonas aeruginosa, the infection of which is the primary cause of death in cystic fibrosis patients.
[18] His research in quorum sensing led Greenberg to study the phenomenon of biofilm, which is a high-density cluster of bacteria that attaches to each other and to surfaces and is embedded in an extracellular matrix.
[21] Greenberg met his wife, Caroline Harwood, during his PhD years at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.