Meet Walter E. Massey

"I hope I have encouraged [everyone] to be dauntless and courageous when considering a new barrier-breaking path in life." Walter E. Massey

Heralded as a leading American physicist, eighty-four-year-old Walter E. Massey currently chairs the board guiding the construction of the Giant Magellan Telescope which is being built to have 4x the resolution power of the James Webb Space Telescope. 

Membership on boards has long been part of Massey's service, including stints with McDonald's (he is director), Bank of America (Chairman in 2009), BP, Tribune Company, Motorola, First National Bank of Chicago, Continental Materials, Amoco, Research-Cottrell, Delta Airlines, and Analytic Services.

Also, the Mellon Foundation, the Commonwealth Fund, the MacArthur Foundation, the Rand Corporation, the National Center for Civil and Human Rights, the Smithsonian Institution, the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, the Woods Hole Institute, and many more.

Massey, born in deeply segregated Hattiesburg, Mississippi in 1938, was at 16 identified for his gift in mathematics and given a scholarship via the Ford Foundation to attend Morehouse College in Atlanta. There he met Sabinus Christensen, a white physics teacher at the historically black, all-male school, who guided Massey to a degree in mathematics and physics and suggested he pursue his doctorate at Washington University in St. Louis.

Why Washington University? Because Christensen believed a black student like Massey had a better chance of being accepted by faculty and peers there.

His academic work led him to a research position at Argonne National Laboratory operated for the Department of Energy by the University of Chicago. Teaching positions would follow at the University of Illinois, Brown University, and then the University of Chicago.

His professorship at the University of Chicago coincided with becoming the director of the Argonne National Laboratory. In 1987 Massey presided over the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and in 1990 he was appointed director of the National Science Foundation by President George Bush.

After the stint at the NSF, Massey was selected provost and vice president of academic affairs for the University of California system, moved on to become president of Morehouse College, then president of the School of Art Institute in Chicago.

Now, as noted, Massey seeks funding for the Giant Magellan Telescope. 

To date, Walter E. Massey is the only person to chair both the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design.