Career
- 1954 - Lawrence Livermore Labs, working on nuclear weapons. Frequent travel to Nevada Test site.
- 1957 - Radiation Lab in Berkeley, to work at the bevatron and on the health physics team.
- 1959 - Project director of Plowshare (peaceful uses of atomic bombs) at Livermore. Technical advisor at the Nuclear Test Ban Conference in Geneva.
- 1961 - Director of Theoretical Division at NASA. Measured cosmic ray neutrons in space and was the first to make a quantitative energy spectrum on them. From "Wilmot's World": "I always felt a little bit like a fraud as Director of the Theoretical Division, not really being a theorist."
- Goddard Space Flight Center. From "Wilmot's World": "My years at Goddard were very happy and productive. The space program was just a few years old. I organized a series of Friday afternoon seminars on space research. Almost every week we heard about something brand new about space. The director of Goddard was an aeronautical engineer, Harry Goett. He was a fine man with a research background and gave us a lot of freedom.... My own research was on the Van Allen radiation belt. (We developed) a theory to explain how solar protons can diffuse inward and gain energy in the Earth's magnetic field. This quantitatively explained the observed Leo Davis protons."
- 1966 - Director of Science and Applications for Apollo Moon Program, in Houston.
- 1969 - Director of the Research Labs of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) in Boulder, CO.
- 1981 - Director of National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, CO.
- 1986 - Director of the High Energy and Nuclear Physics Program at the Department of Energy (DOE), Washington, D.C.
- 1996 - Retired. From "Wilmot's World": "I have much enjoyed wandering through Space Science and meteorology and oceanography and changing fields every decade. I think it was a lot more fun than staying in one place and doing one thing all my life...."
Read more about this topic: Wilmot N. Hess
Famous quotes containing the word career:
““Never hug and kiss your children! Mother love may make your children’s infancy unhappy and prevent them from pursuing a career or getting married!” That’s total hogwash, of course. But it shows on extreme example of what state-of-the-art “scientific” parenting was supposed to be in early twentieth-century America. After all, that was the heyday of efficiency experts, time-and-motion studies, and the like.”
—Lawrence Kutner (20th century)
“I doubt that I would have taken so many leaps in my own writing or been as clear about my feminist and political commitments if I had not been anointed as early as I was. Some major form of recognition seems to have to mark a woman’s career for her to be able to go out on a limb without having her credentials questioned.”
—Ruth Behar (b. 1956)
“He was at a starting point which makes many a man’s career a fine subject for betting, if there were any gentlemen given to that amusement who could appreciate the complicated probabilities of an arduous purpose, with all the possible thwartings and furtherings of circumstance, all the niceties of inward balance, by which a man swings and makes his point or else is carried headlong.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)