Bernard Cohen was born (1924) and raised in Pittsburgh, PA and did his undergraduate work at Case (now Case Western Reserve Univ.). After service as an engineering officer with the U.S. Navy in the Pacific and the China coast during World War II, he did graduate work in Physics at Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie-Mellon Univ.), receiving a Ph.D. in 1950 with a thesis on “Experimental Studies of High Energy Nuclear Reactions” – at that time “high energy” was up to 15 MeV.