Hans Mark (1929-2021) *92

was a German-born American government official who served as Secretary of the Air Force, as as a Deputy Administrator of NASA. He was an expert and consultant in aerospace design and national defense policy.

Mark retired from the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics at the University of Texas at Austin's Cockrell School of Engineering in July 2014. Mark was born in Mannheim, Baden, Germany. He lived in Vienna for a time before escaping the Nazi Anschluss via Switzerland. Before the collapse of France the Mark family moved to London. Mark's father, Herman Francis Mark, a prominent polymer chemist, secured a position with a Canadian paper company and left before the family could accompany him. Finally, in late 1939, his family joined him in Hawkesbury. About a year later the family moved to the United States. After becoming an American citizen in 1945, he graduated from New York's Stuyvesant High School in 1947. He went on to receive a bachelor's degree in physics from the University of California, Berkeley where he was a member of Sigma Pi fraternity in 1951. He earned a PhD in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1954.

After completion of his doctorate, Mark stayed on at MIT as a research associate and acting head of the Neutron Physics Group Laboratory for Nuclear Science. He returned to UC Berkeley in 1955 and remained there until 1958 as a research physicist at the University's Lawrence Radiation Laboratory in Livermore. Dr. Mark then returned to MIT as an assistant professor of physics. In 1960, he again returned to the University of California's Livermore Radiation Laboratory's Experimental Physics Division. He remained there until 1964, when he became chairman of the university's Department of Nuclear Engineering and administrator of the Berkeley Research Reactor.

Mark has also taught undergraduate and graduate courses in physics and engineering at Boston University and the University of Californi