Bertholf was a native of rural Kansas, attended Friends University, and graduated from Southwestern College in Winfield, Kansas. He served in the coast artillery in World War I (stationed at Fort Monroe, Virginia). Bertholf undertook graduate studies at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore in 1921 and began his career teaching biology at North Carolina College for Women. For 15 years, he supplemented his teaching income with summer work performing research for the U.S. Agriculture Department’s Bureau of Entomology and Plant Quarantine. He also taught at Western Maryland College for 25 years, where he was also Dean of Freshman and Dean of Faculty. In 1930, Bertholf received a postdoctoral fellowship to study in Munich on a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, and in 1948 moved to the West Coast to teach at the College of the Pacific, as a Professor of Biology and Academic Vice-President. In 1958, Lloyd M. Bertholf became the 14th President of IWU and he served until 1968.