Career
Happer's academic career began at Columbia University, where he eventually became a full professor and director of the Columbia Radiation Laboratory.
Happer joined the JASON advisory group in 1976, and was still active there in 2005.
In 1980, he left Columbia to go to Princeton. He is credited with a key insight in 1982 that made adaptive optics possible: there is a layer of sodium in the mesosphere, at around 90 to 100 km of elevation, which could be lit by a laser beam to make an artificial guide star. His idea was tested successfully by DARPA but classified for possible military applications. The military-designed technology was partially unclassified in 1991, after the same idea was independently proposed by two French astronomers. In 1994, Happer and co-authors published a declassified version of the JASON reports on adaptive optics. Happer was chairman of the steering committee for JASON, from 1987 to 1990, and was the Class of 1909 Professor of Physics at Princeton University from 1988 to 1991. In 1991, he joined the United States Department of Energy as director of energy research. He served in that position until being dismissed in 1993 for his views on the ozone layer, after which he returned to his position at Princeton. He co-founded Magnetic Imaging Technologies Inc. in 1994. He held the Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professorship of Physics from 2003 until his retirement in 2014.
Happer has served as a trustee of the MITRE Corporation, the Richard Lounsbery Foundation, and the Marshall Institute, of which he was chairman from 2006 until it was disbanded in 2015.
Happer is a co-founder and board member of an advocacy group called the CO2 Coalition, established in 2015. He has described the group as aiming to "educate the public that increased atmospheric levels of CO2 will benefit the world". The group has been funded by donations of over $100,000 from the Sarah Scaife Foundation and the Mercer Family Foundation of Robert Mercer and Rebekah Mercer, as well as $50,000 each from the Searle Freedom Trust, the Thomas W. Smith Foundation, the Lynde & Harry Bradley Foundation, and the Achelis and Bodman Foundation.
