Dr. Vigdor L. Teplitz

Chief of Higher Education
(301) 286-9690
Vigdor.L.Teplitz@nasa.gov

Vigdor L. (Vic) Teplitz was an undergraduate at MIT and did his Ph.D. at the University of Maryland in 1962 in elementary particle theory. He worked in particle theory as a post-doc at the Lawrence Berkeley Radiation Laboratory and the CERN accelerator laboratory in Geneva before joining the MIT faculty. In 1973 he became Department Head at Virginia Tech and a few years later, after hiring astronomers, started converting to astrophysics and cosmology. From 1978 until 1990, he served in the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (except for a year giving away money to theoretical physics for NSF). In 1990, he became Department Chair at Southern Methodist University (SMU). In 1991, he became, in addition, Senior Advisor on International Coordination at the nearby Superconducting Supercollider Laboratory (until it was canceled in 1993). He also continued with arms control, first as a consultant and then as a member of a committee that gave advice on arms control and non-proliferation to the Secretary of State. In 2000 he went on leave from SMU to serve as senior policy analyst in the White House Science Office for 2.5 years. He joined Goddard at the beginning of 2003. His wife is a physicist also. They have written several papers together ranging from the cosmological future of the universe to limits on dust in the Kuiper belt from the fact that Pioneer 10 was not damaged by Kuiper Belt dust during the decade it spent there. Their son is an astronomer at Caltech working on the Spitzer Infra Red Telescope. Their daughter is a Stanford Ph.D. in Slavic language.