#21. Two Identities: A Physicist-Administrator at Los Alamos and Also a Rabbi

Jack Shlachter is a Ph.D. physicist who worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico for over three decades, also at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, as well as two organizations based in Vienna, Austria: the International Atomic Energy Agency, and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization. Dr. Shlachter's training was as an experimentalist creating and diagnosing plasmas, high temperature mixtures of electrons and ions, with applicability to nuclear fusion, a potentially carbon-neutral source of nearly unlimited energy. 

At Los Alamos, he served as Division Leader of the Physics Division and later of the Theoretical Division, the only individual to have held both roles in the history of the Lab. These positions involved the responsibility for budgets in excess of $100M and the management of hundreds of scientists, technicians, administrators, students, and postdoctoral assistants.

​Dr. Shlachter is also a rabbi, having been ordained in 1995 by Rabbi Gershon Winkler of Cuba, New Mexico. He has held Jewish leadership roles both in Los Alamos and in Santa Fe, and well as serving as a visiting rabbi in Vienna and Beijing. In addition to his current pulpit in Santa Fe, he conducts lifecycle events – such as weddings, bar and bat mitz­vahs, and funerals – under the banner of “Judaism for your nuclear family.”

(Recorded 7/28/22.)