Victor M. Bearg builds legacy of scientific support
Victor Bearg believes the solutions to the world’s most pressing problems lie in science — and he says Carnegie Mellon University is part of that equation.
“As we’ve learned more about the problems facing us — things like energy production, global warming, diet, healthy living — there are all these new questions that we didn’t know to ask,” said Bearg, who graduated from the then-Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1964 with a bachelor’s degree in physics. “Now we’re learning to ask them, and science can provide, in many cases, better answers than we had in the past.”
Bearg’s relationship with Carnegie Mellon began when he started considering colleges as a high school student in Queens, New York.
“My favorite courses in high school were physics, math, chemistry and biology,” he said. “Carnegie Institute of Technology seemed like a good choice. But I had never been to Pittsburgh. I even spelled it by leaving off the ‘h.’
“One of the reasons CMU is so important to me is that, as a first-year student, this was the time when I was away from my family. For the first time, I was making those life decisions for myself.”
Bearg arrived on campus in the fall 1960. At the time, all science and engineering students were required to take the same courses.
“One of the fall semester courses was Engineering Drawing 101. It was copying drawings of mechanical parts from a textbook,” he said. “I heard there was a new, experimental course — computer programming — being offered in the spring semester. I knew absolutely nothing about computers. But I knew the course had to be better than Engineering Drawing 102.”
A few years earlier, Alan Perlis, a 1942 graduate of Carnegie Tech, started offering freshman-level computer programming courses. Once Bearg began taking programming and joined the service fraternity Alpha Phi Omega, he was hooked on the idea of combining computer science and physics.
“I liked physics because the questions are bigger,” he said. “In physics, you study the universe.”
After graduation, he enrolled as a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania but left shortly after for a job at the Princeton-Pennsylvania Accelerator.
“I answered an ad in The New York Times for what turned out to be a programming position at a particle accelerator,” Bearg said. “What could be better? The problems to solve were always new and exciting. Also, all the people I worked with were interesting and very smart. The job was a wonderful match for my physics and computing background, both learned at Carnegie Institute of Technology.”
He stayed at Princeton throughout his 41-year career. While working, he earned a master’s degree in computer science from Rutgers University.
“It was all very exciting to be involved,” he said. “Computers and programming were new and changing every day.”
He retired in 2006 as a systems programmer and senior UNIX administrator for Princeton University. For the past two decades, Bearg has traveled the world and continued to give back to the scientific community.
“I’ve been doing my part. Now I want to enable future generations to be able to do theirs,” he said.
At Carnegie Mellon, he has established multiple programs, including the Bearg Fellowship for a graduate student in physics and a lecture series in neuroscience and also one in science and humanities.
He also established the Victor M. Bearg Museum of Physics. Curated by now-Emeritus Professor Barry Luokkala, the museum is located on the A-level of Doherty Hall near the undergraduate physics laboratories. The exhibits include original furniture and equipment used by the first students enrolled at the Carnegie Technical Schools. It also features memorabilia from NASA’s Ranger Project and artifacts from Nobel Prize recipients connected to Carnegie Mellon’s Department of Physics.
“The physics museum was just an opportunity I could not pass up,” he said. “That experience got me thinking about how to support an institution that prepared me to head in such a good direction.”
His most recent gift is a bequest to the McWilliams Center for Cosmology and Astrophysics to create the Victor M. Bearg Post-Doctoral Endowed Fellowship to support one or more fellows.
“There are important questions in science that affect how we and future generations will survive and live,” Bearg said. “I find those things interesting, and I want to support further advancement in all kinds of different areas.”