Timothy J. Gay

Timothy Gay was born in Ashtabula, Ohio on 23 March, 1953. He was raised in Pleasant Hill, Ohio, a farming community of 1000 people in western Ohio. An only child, his parents are William Gay, a retired pastor in the United Church of Christ, and Annabeth McClelland Gay, a retired church musician. Gay attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachussets, graduating in 1971. At Andover, he was the manager of the varsity football team his senior year. Players on that team included Bill Belichick, currently the coach of the New England Patriots, Ernie Adams, a former assistant coach with the New England Patriots and the New York Giants, and Milt Holt, a former State Senator from Hawaii and the starting quarterback for Harvard for four years.

Gay got a B.S. in physics from the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California in 1975. While at Caltech he played tackle for its football team, a squad so notoriously inept that it was profiled by the Wall Street Journal in the fall of 1974. (A typical Caltech season record was 1-7, against such football powerhouses as LaVerne College, Harvey Mudd College, and the University of California - Riverside (freshmen).)

Upon graduating from Caltech, Gay matriculated at the University of Chicago, where he earned his Ph.D. in Experimental Atomic Physics in 1980. He then worked as a Research Physicist and Lecturer at Yale University until 1983, when he joined the faculty at the University of Missouri - Rolla. Since 1993, he has been a Professor of Physics at the University of Nebraska - Lincoln.

Gay's research interests center on the scattering of electrons by atomic and molecular targets and elementary particle physics. His research group, comprising a postdoctoral fellow, three graduate students, and four undergraduate students, is funded by the National Science Foundation. During his career, Gay has been a principle investigator on more than $4.4 million of grants, and has published more than 60 articles in the refereed scientific literature. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society.

Gay married Anna Christine Nothstine of St. Charles, Missouri in 1975. She is currently a math teacher at Lincoln Southeast High School. They have two children, Frederick, age 19, and Bertram, age 16. Besides being a rabid Cornhuskers fan, Gay's hobbies are Civil War history, rock and roll music, and the raising of children.