Hans Mark was born in Germany in 1929. He arrived in the United States in 1941 and attended the University of California, Berkeley from 1947 to 1951. He was a member of the Naval ROTC and majored in physics earning an A.B. degree in January 1951. From 1951 to 1955, Mark attended graduate school at MIT, earning a Ph.D. in physics in 1954.

In 1955, he returned to California working as the Academic Assistant to Professor Edward Teller. In 1956 he joined the research staff at what was then the University of California’s Radiation Laboratory (Livermore site) as a Research Physicist. In 1959, Mark spent a short period at MIT retuning in 1960 to the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory as Physics Division Leader. At the same time Mark was also appointed Associate Professor of Nuclear Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1964, Mark was named Chairman of the Nuclear Engineering Department and was also promoted to the rank of Professor. He retained a part time appointment at the Livermore Laboratory.

In 1969, Mark resigned from the University of California to join NASA as Director of the NASA-Ames Research Center, a post he held for eight years. In 1977, President Carter selected Mark to be Under Secretary of the Air Force and Director of the National Reconnaissance Office, and in 1979 he was named Secretary of the Air Force, a post he held until March 1981 when he was nominated by President Reagan to be Deputy Administrator of NASA.

In 1984, upon Congressional approval of NASA’s Space Station initiative, Mark left government service after 15 years to accept the position of Chancellor of the University of Texas System. In 1992 he relinquished this position and joined the faculty of the UT Austin campus as Professor of Aerospace Engineering. In 1998, Mark took a leave of absence to serve in the Clinton administration as Director of Defense Research and Engineering, returning to UT Austin in 2001.

Source: University of Texas at Austin Robert S. Strauss Center web site.

Scope and Contents

Papers trace the professional life of Mark from the early 1960s to the late 1980s, including substantial series of correspondence and chronological files. A smaller series relates to his personal life.