Meet: David Koch

Education and Background (asked in 1996)
From grade school on I have always enjoyed doing math problems. I went to Milwaukee Lutheran High School and graduated in 1963. In high school I was stage manager, yearbook photographer and worked in the printing club (actually hand-set type and hand-fed the printing press.) I went to the national science fair in 1963 in Albuquerque, NM.

I enrolled in the Applied Mathematics and Engineering Physics Program at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and transferred to UW-Madison where I graduated in 1967. While in Madison I worked at radio station WHA ("The oldest station in the Nation") and in the Space Physics lab, where the professor in charge was flying x-ray experiments on rockets and the Apollo missions. Then I went to graduate school at Cornell University where Prof. Ken Greisen was my thesis professor. My research was in gamma ray astronomy and I built a huge gamma ray detector (10 ft in diameter and 20 ft long), which we flew six times on unmanned helium-filled balloons to 120,000 ft altitudes and detected the first pulsed high-energy gamma rays from the Crab pulsar. I finished my Ph. D. in 1972.

I then went to work for a small company in Cambridge, MA called American Science and Engineering. At the time this was the world-premier group in x-ray astronomy. The group had just launched the UHURU x-ray astronomy satellite. UHURU was launched from Kenya on their day of independence thus the name, which in Swahelli means independence. At the time of the launch only about 30 x-ray sources were known. By the end of the mission we had found many hundreds of sources, including pulsars, quasars, and pulsating x-ray binaries. I then became project scientist for the next generation x-ray facility known as the Einstein Observatory, which could actually focus x-rays and make x-ray images of the sky. The head of this x-ray astronomy group was Riccardo Giaconni, who moved from AS&E to the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and then became the director of the Space Telescope Science Institute.

In 1977, I also moved to the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, but instead of continuing in x-ray astronomy I went into infrared astronomy and became project scientist for the Infrared Telescope that was flown on Spacelab-2 on the Shuttle Challenger in the summer of 1985. In 1988, I moved to NASA Ames Research Center to work on the Space Infrared Telescope Facility (SIRTF), which was to be an infrared version of a great observatory like the Hubble Space Telescope. In 1990, I switched projects from SIRTF and am now working on those projects listed above.

My Motivation
I love to solve problems, conceive of ideas and use the ideas to discover something new. I enjoy building things and making things work. My reward and satisfaction comes not from making money (trying to accumulate wealth), but rather from discovering something new that no human had ever known before and hopefully contribute to the wealth of human discoveries such that what I leave behind is knowledge for all future generations.

Goal for Next Year
Write a winning proposal for the FRESIP project.

Other Interests
I enjoy skiiing, geography, traveling, photography, and reading (Bible, history, humor). I watch about one hour of TV per month. I like to collect classical CDs, well-written stories, clever cartoons (especially making use of a play on words), homonyms, and oxymorons. Nothing irritates me more than when people turn nouns into verbs by adding "-ize." There are plenty of good verbs in the English language!