Wilmot N. Hess - Career

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:

    “I seemed intent on making it as difficult for myself as possible to pursue my “male” career goal. I not only procrastinated endlessly, submitting my medical school application at the very last minute, but continued to crave a conventional female role even as I moved ahead with my “male” pursuits.”
    —Margaret S. Mahler (1897–1985)

    “What exacerbates the strain in the working class is the absence of money to pay for services they need, economic insecurity, poor daycare, and lack of dignity and boredom in each partner’s job. What exacerbates it in upper-middle class is the instability of paid help and the enormous demands of the career system in which both partners become willing believers. But the tug between traditional and egalitarian models of marriage runs from top to bottom of the class ladder.”
    —Arlie Hochschild (20th century)

    “I restore myself when I’m alone. A career is born in public—talent in privacy.”
    —Marilyn Monroe (1926–1962)