My Life as Scientist and Professor

Abstract

The foundations for my professional life began at Stanford University, thanks to a four year Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps scholarship and, in my fifth year, securing a graduate research assistantship. Although I was enrolled at Stanford as an Electrical Engineering major, I took many physics classes. My Physics teachers included Willis Lamb and Robert Hofstadter (Nobel Prize winning faculty) as well as the renowned Wolfgang Panofsky. In addition, I had close contact with two Physics graduate assistants: Henry Kendall (who later became a Nobel Prize winner) and James Bjorken (who was awarded the coveted Wolf Prize in physics). From these contacts and my classes, I came to learn that Physics would be my lifetime intellectual home. Not incidentally, Kendall and Bjorken were also responsible for my collegiate addiction to rock climbing, usually on the soft sandstone near Stanford but also along the walls of Yosemite Valley and peaks of Tuolumne Meadows.