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Asimov earned his master's degree in 1941 and married a woman named Gertrude Blugerman. This marriage would eventually produce a son and a daughter. During the second World War, Asimov worked as a chemist at the Naval Air Experimental Station in Philadelphia. He served in the U.S. Army in 1945 and 1946, achieving the rank of corporal. After his service, Asimov returned to Columbia University, studying biochemical reactions and earning his Ph.D. in 1948. He then began postdoctoral studies on nucleic acids, and was invited to teach biochemistry at the Boston University Medical School in 1949. He became a tenured professor there in 1955. Asimov had not stopped writing during his time as professor, writing science fiction in his spare time. He had published his first full novel in 1950, a book called Pebble in the Sky. His other books in the 1950's brought forward many massively innovative and influential ideas and concepts to science fiction. Books such as I, Robot and The Bicentennial Man, for example, introduced Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics, which proposed that robots be guided by rules that above all protected humans and forbade robots doing any harm to people. These three laws ended up becoming "so popular, and seemed so logical, that many people believed real robots would eventually be designed according to Asimov's basic principles" (Encyclopedia of World Biography). In the 1950's Asimov also began his famed Foundation series, a series that would win the 1966 special Hugo award for most outstanding series of all time. The Foundation series was inspired by the work The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in the 1700s, and deals with fundamental issues such as the success or failure of civilizations, free will, and an individual's place in history. The Foundation series even remains popular today, having sold over two million copies. .
In 1958, Asimov stopped teaching in order to pursue writing full-time.
