Goad, Walter B.

From his roots in the red clay soil of rural Georgia during the Depression, Walter Goad went on to a distinguished career in two disparate fields: nuclear weapons design and bioinformatics. Having lived in various towns in Georgia and graduating from Grainger High School in Kinston, N.C., in 1942, Goad set out to become a radio technician and expand his horizons by heading north for the first time. As would be true throughout his early years, his experience would be brief, but fruitful. Shortly after accepting a position with a station in Schenectady, N.Y., Goad was taken under the wing of his employer, who steered him toward college, helping arrange a scholarship at nearby Union College to make it all possible.

With America's entry in the Second World War, however, Goad's college plans changed. At the end of his freshman year, when he became eligible for the draft, Goad enlisted in the Navy and earned a spot in the V-12 officers' training program. The program allowed Goad, along with a small number of other candidates that included Baruch Blumberg, to continue toward his B.S. in physics, which he was awarded in the spring of 1945, just as the war was ending in Europe. His subsequent military career was nearly as brief as his career in radio. After an additional four months of training at midshipman's school in Annapolis, Goad was detached to the Pacific to complete his military obligation aboard a submarine chaser. By the following spring, his service was no longer needed, and he returned home to enter the University of California, Berkeley, as one of the horde of returning veterans pursuing a graduate degree in physics. The departure of Robert Oppenheimer later that year, however, took the luster off of Berkeley and as the appeal of the overtaxed program waned, Goad decided to transfer to Duke to work under the up and coming Lothar Nordheim on a project eventually titled A Theoretical Study of Extensive Cosmic Ray Air Showers (1954).

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