Nicolaas Bloembergen is a Dutch-American physicist and Nobel laureate. He was Born in March 1920, in Dordrecht, Netherlands. He received his Ph.D. degree from University of Leiden under Cor Gorter in 1948; while pursuing his PhD at Harvard, Bloembergen also worked part-time as a graduate research assistant for Edward Mills Purcell at the MIT Radiation Laboratory. He became a professor at Harvard University in Applied Physics. He was brought up in the Protestant household. Bloembergen used much of the material for his Ph.D. thesis: "Nuclear Magnetic Relaxation." The paper enabled him to obtain a doctorate from the University of Leiden in 1948. His research also established the nuclear spin relaxation mechanism by conduction electrons in metals and by paramagnetic impurities in ionic crystals, the phenomenon of spin diffusion, and the large shifts induced by internal magnetic fields in paramagnetic crystals. Bloembergen received many other awards for his work including the National Medal of Science (U.S.) and OSA’s Frederic Ives Medal. He published over 300 papers. During his career, Bloembergen was active in promoting the field of physics, serving as president of the American Physical Society in 1991.