Dr. George M. Briggs, Jr. was born in Wisconsin in 1919. He earned his B.S. in agricultural chemistry (1940), M.S. in biochemistry (1941), and Ph.D. in biochemistry (1944) at the University of Wisconsin. Briggs was Associate Professor (1945-1946) and Professor (1946-1947) of poultry nutrition at the University of Maryland. He also served as Associate Professor of poultry nutrition at the University of Minnesota from 1947 to 1951. Briggs worked as Chief of the Nutrition Unit of the National Institute of Arthritis and Metabolic Diseases in Bethesda, Maryland, from 1951 to 1958, and was Executive Secretary of three training committees (Biochemistry, Nutrition and Pharmacology) in the Division of General Medical Sciences, National Institutes of Health, from 1958 to 1960. He was appointed founding department chairman of the Nutrition and Home Economics Department at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1960, seeing that department through its transition to the Department of Nutritional Sciences in 1962, and serving as chair until 1970. He continued as professor of nutrition in that department until his retirement in 1984. George also was the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs of the College of Natural Resources at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1977 to 1980. A pivotal figure in the field of nutrition, Briggs's most significant contribution to nutrition research was perhaps in his career-long pursuit of the definition of standards for experimental animal diets.