Nicolaas Bloembergen was born in Dordrecht, the Netherlands on March 11, 1920. He received a bachelor's degree in 1941 and a master's degree in 1943 from the University of Utrecht. After graduating, he spent the next two years hiding from the Nazis. After World War II, he moved to the United States to attend Harvard University and work on nuclear magnetic resonance. He returned to the Netherlands to receive a PhD at the University of Leiden in 1948 and defend his thesis. He returned to Harvard in 1949 and became a U.S. citizen in 1958.
He became a professor at Harvard in 1951 and stayed there until his retirement in 1990. He was considered the father of nonlinear optics, which investigates how electromagnetic radiation interacts with matter. He received the National Medal of Science in 1974 and shared the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physics with Arthur Schawlow and Kai M. Siegbahn for his contributions to laser spectroscopy. After retiring from Harvard, Bloembergen became a professor emeritus at the University of Arizona, College of Optical Sciences, in 1991. He wrote several books including Nuclear Magnetic Relaxation and Encounters in Magnetic Resonances: Selected Papers of Nicolaas Bloembergen. He died from cardiorespiratory failure on September 5, 2017 at the age of 97.
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