the superintendent of schools. He had a younger brother, John H. Lawrence, who would become a physician, and was a pioneer in the field of nuclear medicine. Growing up, his best friend was Merle Tuve, who would also go on to become a highly accomplished physicist. Lawrence attended the public schools of Canton and Pierre, then enrolled at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, but transferred after a year to the University of South Dakota in Vermillion. He completed his bachelor's degree in chemistry in 1922, and his Master of Arts (M.A.) degree in physics from the University of Minnesota in 1923 under the supervision of William Francis Gray Swann. For his master's thesis, Lawrence built an experimental apparatus that rotated an ellipsoid through a magnetic field. Lawrence followed Swann to the University of Chicago, and then to Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, where Lawrence completed his Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) degree in physics in 1925 as a Sloane Fellow, writing his doctoral thesis on the photoelectric effect in potassium vapor. He was elected a member of Sigma Xi, and, on Swann's recommendation, received a National Research Council fellowship. Instead of using it to travel to Europe, as was customary at the time, he remained at Yale University with Swann as a researcher. With Jesse Beams from the University of Virginia, Lawrence continued to research the photoelectric effect. They showed that photoelectrons appeared within 2 x 10−9 seconds of the photons striking the photoelectric surface—close to the limit of measurement at the time. Reducing the emission time by switching the light source on and off rapidly made the spectrum of energy emitted broader, in conformance with Werner Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. Early career In 1926 and 1927, Lawrence received offers of assistant professorships from the University of Washington in Seattle and the University of California at a salary of $3,500 per annum. Yale promptly matched the offer of the assistant professorship, but at a salary of $3,000. Lawrence chose to stay at the more prestigious Yale, but because he had never been an instructor, the appointment was resented by some of his fellow faculty, and in the eyes of many it still did not compensate for his South Dakota immigrant background. Lawrence was hired as an associate professor of physics at the University of California in 1928, and two years later became a full professor, becoming the university's youngest professor.