Born December 24, 1915, in Brooklyn, New York, he was the son of J. Lawrence Meem Sr. and Phyllis Deaderick Meem. He grew up on the Mt. Airy Estate near Mt. Jackson in Shenandoah County, Virginia. He married the former Buena Vista Speake of Luray, Virginia in 1940.


"Larry" Meem graduated from the Virginia Military Institute with a B. S. in Chemistry in 1939, winning the Jackson Hope Medal for outstanding academic achievement. At VMI he was known as Brow Meem. After a year of teaching at VMI, he joined the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, serving first at Langley Field, Virginia and then at the Lewis Laboratory in Cleveland, Ohio. After the war years and after completion of his PhD in Nuclear Physics at Indiana University in 1949, he went with the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, Tennessee. He was director of the Bulk Shielding Reactor from 1950 until 1954 and he was in charge of nuclear operation of the Aircraft Reactor Experiment, from 1954 until 1955. He was Chief Reactor Scientist for Alco Products Inc. of Schenectady, New York from 1955 until 1957, and he was in charge of the startup and initial operation of the Army Package Power Reactor at Fort Belvoir, Virginia in 1957.

In the fall of 1957, Dr. Meem joined the faculty of the University of Virginia as Professor of Nuclear Engineering. He was Chairman of the Department and Director of the Nuclear Reactor Facility from 1957 until 1977. He was in charge of the startup of the University of Virginia Reactor in 1960. He was the author of a textbook, Two Group Reactor Theory, published in 1964. In 1981, he retired as Professor Emeritus. As a nuclear expert, he consulted with the Army Foreign Science and Technology Center in Charlottesville from 1981 until 1990. He was a visiting consultant on nuclear fuel cycles at Sandia Laboratory, Albuquerque, New Mexico, from 1977 until 1978, and he was a visiting staff member at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, Los Alamos New Mexico, from 1967 until 1968. He spent the summer of 1965 working on nuclear rockets at the Nevada Test Site, near Las Vegas.

He was a Fellow of the American Nuclear Society, and chairman of the Reactor Operations Division of ANS, from 1970 until 1971. He was a member of the American Physical Society, and the American Society for Engineering Education. He was listed in Who's Who in America, a member of St. Paul's Church in Ivy, and a member of the Thomas Jefferson Chapter of the Sons of the American Revolution.