Lawrence Berliner: Pioneer, educator and champion of biomedical EPR spectroscopy

Abstract

Lawrence Berliner (see Figs 1–3) was born in 1941 in Los Angeles (California, USA). He completed his undergraduate studies in Chemistry at UCLA in 1963 and went on to complete his PhD in Chemistry at Stanford University in 1967. His PhD supervisor, the late Harden M. McConnel, is considered to be one of the leading physical chemists of the last half-century. Whilst Larry was a PhD student at Stanford, McConnel and his team first synthesised spin labels in 1965 [8] for use in the study of biological macromolecules using electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) or electron spin resonance (ESR) spectroscopy.