Guyford Stever

Horton Guyford Stever (born October 24, 1916) is an American administrator, physicist, educator, and engineer.

Biography

Stever was raised in Corning, NY, principally by his maternal grandmother. He played football in high school. He graduated from Colgate University with an undergraduate degree in physics and then from California Institute of Technology in 1941 with a Ph.D. in physics. He joined the staff of the radiation lab at MIT. In 1942 he began serving the military as a civilian scientific liaison officer based in London, England until the end of World War II. After D-Day he was sent to France several times to study German technology.

He returned to MIT after the war, serving as associate dean of engineering there from 1956-1959 and then as a department head. In 1965 he became the fifth President of Carnegie Mellon University (and the first under that name, in 1967), a position he held until 1972. Stever House, a dorm on Carnegie Mellon's campus is named for him.

He also served as the director of the National Science Foundation from 1972 until 1976. Between 1973 and 1977 he was President Gerald Ford's Science Advisor.

Stever received an LL.D. from Bates College in 1977. In 1997, he received the Vannevar Bush Award from the National Science Board.

The Stever Committee

Guyford Stever was chairman or member of numerous advisory committees to the U.S. government. The NACA"s Special Committee on Space Technology, also called the "Stever Committee", was among the better-known of these. It was a special steering committee that was formed with the mandate to coordinate various branches of the Federal government, private companies as well as universities within the United States with NACA's objectives and also harness their expertise in order to develop a space program. [http://history.nasa.gov/SP-4306/ch8.htm NASA Historical Website] ] , was actually serving in the same committee and sitting at the same table as the chief engineer of the V-1, the weapon that terrorised London: Wernher von Braun. [http://cndyorks.gn.apc.org/yspace/articles/vonbraun.htm ...missile research centre run by Wernher von Braun, who later worked on the American space programme] (10 June 2001 Germans at last learn truth about von Braun's 'space research' base. By Tony Paterson in Peenemunde, The Telegraph. Retrieved 9-3-07)] [http://www.ieee-virtual-museum.org/collection/people.php?id=1234763&lid=1 ...Von Braun soon went to work at a secret laboratory called Peenemünde near the Baltic Sea, working on the V-1 missile, which would terrorize Londoners] (IEEE Virtual Museum Retrieved 9-3-07)] As of their meeting on May 26 1958, committee members, starting clockwise from the left of the adjacent picture, included:

References

*cite book | author=Fenton, Edwin | title=Carnegie Mellon 1900-2000: A Centennial History | location=Pittsburgh | publisher=Carnegie Mellon University Press | year=2000 | id=ISBN 0-88748-323-2
*cite book | author=Stever, H. Guyford | title=In War and Peace: My Life in Science and Technology | location=| publisher=Joseph Henry Press | year=2002 | id=ISBN 0-30908-411-3

Footnotes