Hans Mark

Early life and career[edit]

Mark was born in the city of 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, Ontario.^[1] About a year later the family moved to the United States, settling in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, New York after the elder Mark accepted a professorship at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn. After becoming an American citizen in 1945, he graduated from New York's selective Stuyvesant High School in 1947.^[2] 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.^[3] He then earned a Ph.D. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1954.


After receiving 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, California. 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 also taught undergraduate and graduate courses in physics, engineering and management at Boston University, the University of California, Davis and Stanford University.

U.S. government[edit]

In February 1969, he became director of NASA's Ames Research Center, located in Mountain View, California. In this role, he managed the center's research and applications efforts in aeronautics, space science, life science, and space technology.


He subsequently served as Under Secretary of the Air Force from 1977 until July 1979, when he was promoted to Secretary of the Air Force. Concurrently, he served as Director of the then-classified National Reconnaissance Office from August 1977 to October 1979.^[4][5] He remained at this position until 1981, when he was appointed Deputy Administrator of NASA by President Reagan, a position he served in from July 10, 1981 to September 1, 1984. He later returned to the Pentagon in 1999–2000 to serve as Director of Defense Research and Engineering (DDR&E).

Dr. Mark authored or edited eight books and published more than 180 technical reports. His works include: