Dr. Jay Davis is the President of the Hertz Foundation, which funds graduate studies in the applied physical sciences and engineering. Jay is a nuclear physicist trained at the Universities of Texas (BA 63, MA 64) and Wisconsin (PhD 69). During his three-decade career at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, he built accelerators for research in nuclear physics and for materials science in support of the fusion program. In 1988, Davis founded the Center for Accelerator Mass Spectrometry, the World’s most versatile and productive AMS laboratory, creating isotopic tracing and tagging tools for research programs in the geosciences, toxicology, nutritional sciences, oncology, archaeology, and nuclear forensics. At the time he left LLNL to join the Department of Defense in 1998, he was the Associate Director for Earth and Environmental Sciences.
In the national security component of his career, he worked to develop techniques for arms control treaties, was a senior member of the NEST program, served as an inspector in Iraq for UNSCOM after the First Gulf War, and then served as the founding Director of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency. As Director of DTRA, he merged three DoD organizations to create DoD’s operating and technical focus for dealing with all aspects of weapons of mass destruction.
Among his honors are Phi Beta Kappa and Junior Fellow at Texas, an Atomic Energy Commission Postdoctoral Fellowship at Wisconsin, and being twice given the Distinguished Public Service Medal, DoD’s highest civilian award. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and serves on its Panel on Public Affairs. He currently chairs the Nuclear and Radiation Studies Board of the National Academy of Sciences. He also serves on the Board of Distinguished Advisors for the American Committees on Foreign Affairs and the Institutional Review Board of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Jay’s continuing interests are in the areas of nuclear forensics, renewal of the US nuclear force, management of change in organizations, and counter-terrorism. In Livermore, he serves on the Board of Directors of the Livermore Chamber of Commerce and of the Livermore Valley Performing Arts Center as well as the Tri-Valley Innovation Task Force.
