Robert Bacher

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Robert Fox Bacher (August 31, 1905 – November 18, 2004) was an American nuclear physicist and one of the leaders of the Manhattan Project.

Bacher was born in Loudonville, Ohio, and obtained his undergraduate degree and doctorate from the University of Michigan. He arrived at Cornell University as a physics instructor in 1935 and was a full professor when he left in 1949.^[1]

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.In 1943, he joined the Manhattan Project team at Los Alamos, as head of the experimental physics division and then served as head of the bomb physics division in 1944-45.

After World War II, Bacher sat on the United States Atomic Energy Commission from 1946 to 1949. He spoke in favour of physicist and colleague Robert Oppenheimer during the latter's 1954 security hearing. He was a member of the President's Scientific 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.

Bacher died at a retirement home in Montecito, California.