Biography

Richard Shubert has more than 35 years of career experience with academic, governmental, and industrial establishments nationally and abroad in the capacities of pure and applied research that in one way or another is connected to the science of light. He was awarded the degrees of Master of Science (1968) and Doctor of Philosophy (1971) in electrical engineering, with an emphasis on optics, from the University of Washington in Seattle following baccalaureate studies at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles from 1962 to 1965. After more than a year of postdoctoral research at the University of London (University College London and Queen Mary College) and at the Standard Telecommunication Laboratories in Harlow, Essex, England, he returned to Southern California in 1972 to take an appointment in the Electronics Research Division of Rockwell International Corporation in Anaheim where he earned the company’s annual Meritorious Performance Award for original work on integrated optical lasers for infrared applications.

In 1974 Dr. Shubert was appointed an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, where he took his research to a greater depth and breadth by diversifying his interests toward the basic understanding of the true nature of light and its role in quantum mechanical phenomena in the microscopic world and phenomena at the largest scales of the visible cosmos. This work by necessity drew him into all the relevant studies of physics and astrophysics that have a direct bearing on the properties of light, on the space in which it travels, and on why we see the entire universe in the way we do by the use of light and all other wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum.

In 1976 he was called to the National Science Foundation in Washington D. C. for a temporary appointment to take part in making decisions on the award of research grants to universities in the subjects of electrical engineering and applied physics. In 1978 Dr. Shubert officially changed his research objectives toward work at the forefronts of theoretical physics, and in this effort he has had the assistance of many institutions. These cooperating institutions have included, among others, the California State University, in Long Beach and in Fullerton, at the latter of which he taught modern physics, astronomy, and electrical engineering and established and directed the Optical Sciences Laboratory (1983 — 1994); the Space Sciences Division of Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California (1994 — 1998); the Astrophysics Directorate of Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland (1992 — 1998); the Center for Astrophysics and Space Science at the University of California, San Diego (1998); Cambridge University in England (2000 — 2004); and the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of California, Los Angeles (2005 — ). At UCLA he has also been responsible since early 2005 for developing new courses in advanced optics for applications to nanotechnology. Aside from these other responsibilities he continues to serve as the President and Executive Director of the Institute for Fundamental Sciences, which he founded in 1995 as a California nonprofit corporation for scientific research in the public interest and based in Irvine. The objectives of the Institute include the creation of new knowledge in the pure and applied sciences that will not only expand our awareness of the greater universe beyond but also will germinate new technologies in the 21st century based upon emerging fundamental discoveries in physics.