Robert Bacher - Post-World War II

Post-World War II

In 1946 he became director of Cornell's Laboratory of Nuclear Studies. At the same time he began a three-year service on the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, in which role he testified before Congress on what he viewed as a deterioration in the nation's nuclear weapons program. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1953.

In 1954, after Manhattan Project director J. Robert Oppenheimer was falsely accused of having communist ties, Bacher became one of his staunchest supporters. Bacher also served on the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, and to several top government panels throughout the 1950s.

Bacher was a member of the President's Science Advisory Committee (PSAC) chaired by James Rhyne Killian in 1958. He became a professor of physics at the California Institute of Technology in 1949, also chairing the division of physics, mathematics and astronomy from 1949 to 1962, when he was appointed as vice president and provost. He stepped down from the post of provost in 1970, and became a professor emeritus in 1976.