Lester was a gifted student, as demonstrated by his earning the highest score on the New York State Physics Exam the year he graduated from Waterville, NY Central School in 1946.
All three of his children, David Joel, Daniel Gardner, and Laurie Suzanne Eastman, were born by the time he obtained his Bachelor of Science degree.
[1] In 1960–61, Prof. Eastman was recruited to take part in a one-year teaching exchange with associate professor of Electronics Sven Olving at the School of Engineering at Chalmers Institute of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden.
He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1986 for his "...pioneering and continuing contributions to communications technology resulting from the development of high-speed and high-frequency gallium arsenide devices.
"[4] Whilst at Cornell University, he was awarded in 2001 the status of Fellow of the American Physical Society[5][6] after being nominated by their Forum on Industrial and Applied Physics[7] for pioneering contributions to the concepts of ballistic transport and piezoelectric doping in ultra-small III-V heterojunction transistors for applications in high-speed and microwave power devices and circuits and for leadership in transitioning electric.