Laura B. Eisenstein (1942–1985) was a professor in the physics department at the University of Illinois until her early death. Eisenstein was known for her contributions to the understanding of light-energy transduction mechanisms in biological molecules and their higher order assemblies. She was an experimentalist and spectroscopist who was particularly well known for her contributions applying the techniques of x-ray absorption spectroscopy and time-resolved resonance Raman spectroscopy to the study of biomolecules. These studies indicated that phenomena such as quantum-mechanical tunnelling can be successfully investigated even in soft-matter systems like proteins.