[1] Born in Worcester, Massachusetts, to Theodore, a mechanical engineer father, and Mildred, a homemaker mother, Englund grew up alongside brother Donald, a teacher and Robert, a doctor, as well as his cousin, the artist Joyce Reopel.
[2] He received funding from the National Institutes of Health for his postdoctoral fellowship at the Stanford University School of Medicine where he studied with Nobel laureate Arthur Kornberg.
[1] Englund was later recruited to join the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine faculty, where he stayed for more than 40 years until retiring as professor emeritus.
[7] He is best known for his work with African trypanosomiasis, a potentially fatal disease that infects both human and animals, which is spread by the tse-tse fly in sub-Saharan Africa.
[2] Englund's focus was on researching the structure and function of the genetic material in trypanosomes, the parasites that also lend their name to the disease.