Laurence Lavelle was born in Dublin, Ireland and went to St.David’s in Johannesburg and Bishops in Cape Town, South Africa. At the University of Cape Town (UCT) he completed his B.Sc. (Chemistry major, and Microbiology and Physical Oceanography minors), B.Sc. (Honors, Chemistry), and M.Sc. (Distinction, Physical Chemistry). While at UCT he was also a research assistant, teaching assistant, and a tutor. After graduating from UCT he accepted a faculty position in the Chemistry Dept. at the University of The Witwatersrand (WITS), South Africa. He then moved to the United States and his M.A. and Ph.D. are both in Molecular Biophysics from Princeton University. After one year as a post-doctorate at UCLA’s Molecular Biology Institute he joined the faculty in the department of Chemistry and Biochemistry where he currently teaches over two thousand students per year and supervises over thirty teaching assistants and tutors per year. Students consider his lectures outstanding with class average evaluations above 8 on a 1-9 scale. He has also taught at the University of Cape Town, the State University of New York at Stony Brook, the University of the Witwatersrand, and Princeton University.
          He is active in research and has published in the areas of host-guest chemistry, DNA and RNA stability and structure, and virus stability and self-assembly. He is a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Chemical Society, the American Physical Society, the Biophysical Society, Sigma Xi, The Royal Society of Chemistry, and the American Federation of Teachers. 
          He is the recipient of many research and teaching awards including the Sir Robert Kotze Award, the Harry Crossley Award, a CSIR Fellowship, Berlex Fellowship, Molecular Biophysics NIH Fellowship, the Herbert Newby McCoy Award for Innovative Research, the Hanson-Dow Award for Teaching Excellence at UCLA, and the UCLA AAP Faculty Recognition Award. He has one patent and is the coauthor of four books.
 
Web Page: http://www.chem.ucla.edu/dept/Faculty/lavelle/Lavelle.pdf