[4] Ernest Lawrence, who won the Nobel prize for inventing the cyclotron, founded the lab and served as its director until his death in 1958.

[6] Lab founder Ernest Lawrence believed that scientific research is best done through teams of individuals with different fields of expertise, working together, and his laboratory still considers that a guiding principle today.

[3] 23 Berkeley Lab employees were contributors to reports by the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which shared the Nobel Peace Prize.

[2] In 2022, Berkeley Lab had the greatest research publication impact of any single government laboratory in the world in physical sciences and chemistry, as measured by Nature Index.

[32] Berkeley Lab manages the program in close partnership with Activate, a nonprofit organization established to scale the Cyclotron Road fellowship model to a greater number of innovators around the U.S. and the world.

[33] Cyclotron Road fellows receive two years of stipend, over $100,000 of research support, intensive mentorship and a startup curriculum, and access to the expertise and facilities of Berkeley Lab.

[34] Since members of the first cohort completed their fellowships in 2017, the 84 start-up companies founded by Cyclotron Road Fellows have raised over $2.5 billion in follow-on funding.

[37] Eventually these machines grew too large to be held on the university grounds, and in 1940 the lab moved to its current site atop the hill above campus.

Leslie Groves visited Lawrence's Radiation Laboratory in late 1942 as he was organizing the Manhattan Project, meeting J. Robert Oppenheimer for the first time.

Oppenheimer was tasked with organizing the nuclear bomb development effort and founded today's Los Alamos National Laboratory to help keep the work secret.

Lawrence's lab helped contribute to what have been judged to be the three most valuable technology developments of the war (the atomic bomb, proximity fuze, and radar).

The scientists and engineers at Berkeley Lab continued to build ambitious large projects to accelerate the advance of science.

In 1955, during the Bevatron's first full year of operation, Physicists Emilio Segrè and Owen Chamberlain won the competition to observe the antiprotons for the first time.

Luis Alvarez led the design and construction of several liquid hydrogen bubble chambers, which were used to discover a large number of new elementary particles using Bevatron beams.

[49] Inspired by the 1973 oil crisis, he started up large team efforts that developed several technologies that radically improved energy efficiency.

He developed the first energy-efficiency standards for buildings and appliances in California, which helped the state to sustain constant electricity use per capita from 1973 to 2006, while it rose by 50% in the rest of the country.

[50][51] By 1980, George Smoot had built up a strong experimental group in Berkeley, building instruments to measure the cosmic microwave background (CMB) in order to study the early universe.

He became the principal investigator for the Differential Microwave Radiometer (DMR) instrument that was launched in 1989 as part of the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) mission.

The full sky maps taken by the DMR made it possible for COBE scientists to discover the anisotropy of the CMB, and Smoot shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2006 with John Mather.

[55] David Shirley had proposed in the early 1990s building this new synchrotron source specializing in imaging materials using extreme ultraviolet to soft x-rays.

[60] In 2001, Chemla proposed the establishment of the Molecular Foundry, to make cutting-edge instruments and expertise for nanotechnology accessible to a broad research community.

[76] The Lab built a new facility to house the JCAP laboratories and collaborative research space, and it was dedicated as Chu Hall in 2015.

[81] The mission of JCESR is to deliver transformational new concepts and materials that will enable a diversity of high performance next-generation batteries for transportation and the grid.

On November 12, 2015, Laboratory Director Paul Alivisatos and Deputy Director Horst Simon were joined by University of California President Janet Napolitano, UC Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks, and the head of DOE's ASCR program Barb Helland to dedicate a Shyh Wang Hall, a facility designed to host the NERSC supercomputers and staff, the ESnet staff, and the research divisions in the Computing Sciences area.

[82] The building was designed with a novel seismic floor for the 20,000 square foot machine room in addition to features that take advantage of the coastal climate to provide energy-efficient air conditioning for the computing systems.

[86] In 2016, the Laboratory entered a period of intensive modernization: an unprecedented number of major projects to upgrade existing scientific facilities and to build new ones.

Berkeley Lab physicists led the construction of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, which is designed to create three-dimensional maps of the distribution of matter covering an unprecedented volume of the universe with unparalleled detail.