William Happer Ph.D

William Happer Ph.D General Information

Biography

Dr. William Happer served as Chairman, Board of Directors at Richard Lounsbery Foundation. He is a Professor in the Department of Physics at Princeton University and is a specialist in modern optics, optical and radio frequency spectroscopy of atoms and molecules, and spin-polarized atoms and nuclei. Born July 27, l939 in Vellore , India , Dr. Happer's parents were Lt. Col. William Happer, a Scottish physician in the Indian Army, and Dr. Gladys Morgan Happer, a medical missionary from North Carolina . He received a B. S. degree in Physics from the University of North Carolina in l960 and the PhD degree in Physics from Princeton University in 1964. He began his academic career in 1964 at Columbia University as a member of the research and teaching staff of the Physics Department. While serving as a Professor of Physics he also served as Co-Director of the Columbia Radiation Laboratory from 1971 to 1976, and Director from 1976 to 1979. In l980 he joined the faculty at Princeton University . He was named the Class of 1909 Professor of Physics in 1988. On August 5, 1991 , with the consent of the Senate, he was appointed Director of Energy Research in the Department of Energy by President George Bush. While serving in that capacity under Secretary of Energy James Watkins, he oversaw a basic research budget of some $3 billion, which included much of the federal funding for high energy and nuclear physics, materials science, magnetic confinement fusion, environmental science, biology, the human genome project, and other areas. He remained at the DOE until May 31, 1993 to help during the transition to the Clinton Administration. He was reappointed Professor of Physics at Princeton University on June 1, 1993 , and named Eugene Higgens Professor of Physics and Chair of the University Research Board in 1995. He has maintained an interest in applied, as well as basic science, and he has served as a consultant to numerous firms, charitable foundations and government agencies. From 1987 to 1990 he served as Chairman of the Steering Committee of JASON, a group of scientists and engineers who advise agencies of the Federal Government on matters of defense, intelligence, energy policy and other technical problems. He is a Trustee of the Richard Lounsbery Foundation, and a co-founder in 1994 of Magnetic Imaging Technologies Incorporated (MITI), a small company specializing in the use of laser polarized noble gases for magnetic resonance imaging. MITI was purchased by Nycomed Amersham in 1999. He has published over 160 scientific papers. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. He was awarded an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship in 1966, an Alexander von Humboldt Award in 1976, the 1997 Broida Prize and the 1999 Davisson-Germer Prize of the American Physical Society, and the Thomas Alva Edison Patent Award in 2000.