Lauren Sompayrac, PhD - Retired Professor, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado

PDr. Lauren Sompayrac was born in Jacksonville, Florida, on September 4, 1941. He attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and received a B.S. degree in physics in 1963, and a Ph.D. degree in elementary particle physics in 1969. After two years of postdoctoral research in particle physics, he moved to Copenhagen where he was a Postdoctoral Fellow for two years at the Microbiology Institute. Returning to the United States in 1973, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Pathology at the Harvard Medical School where he studied tumor viruses. In 1976, he moved to the Department of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology at the University of Colorado to continue his work on tumor viruses, eventually rising to the rank of Research Professor before his retirement in 1998. In retirement, he writes science books, and is the author of How the Immune System Works, published by Blackwell Science in 1999, and How Pathogenic Viruses Work, published by Jones and Bartlett in 2001.