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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 (equivalent to $61,400 in 2023). 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. He became a full professor two years later, becoming the university's youngest professor. Based on Frédéric and Irène Joliot-Curie 's 1934 published work on artificial radioactivity, Lawrence discovered the nitrogen-13 isotope by firing high-energy protons into a carbon-13 element in his laboratory. He and his team including Martin Kamen and Samuel Ruben accidentally discovered the carbon-14 isotope by bombarding graphite with high-energy protons. Robert Gordon Sproul, who became university president the day after Lawrence became a professor, was a member of the Bohemian Club, and he sponsored Lawrence's membership in 1932. Through this club, Lawrence met William Henry Crocker, Edwin Pauley, and John Francis Neylan. They were influential men who helped him obtain money for his energetic nuclear particle investigations. There was great hope for medical uses to come from the development of particle physics, and this led to much of the early funding that Lawrence was able to obtain for research.

While at Yale, Lawrence met Mary Kimberly (Molly) Blumer, the eldest of four daughters of George Blumer, the dean of the Yale School of Medicine. They first met in 1926 and became engaged in 1931, and were married on May 14, 1932, at Trinity Church on the Green in New Haven, Connecticut. They had six children: Eric, Margaret, Mary, Robert, Barbara, and Susan. Lawrence named his son Robert after theoretical physicist Robert Oppenheimer, his closest friend in Berkeley. In 1941, Molly's sister Elsie married Edwin McMillan, who would go on to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1951 with Glenn T. Seaborg.