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Bill Quirk

William J. "Bill" Quirk
Member of the California State Assembly
from the 20th district
Assumed office
December 3, 2012
Preceded by Mary Hayashi (redistricted)
Personal details
Born (1946-09-08) September 8, 1946 (age 70)
Summit, New Jersey
Nationality American
Political party Democratic
Residence Hayward, California
Alma mater Columbia University (BS) (PhD)
Profession Nuclear physicist

William J. "Bill" Quirk is an American politician currently serving in the California State Assembly. He is a Democrat representing the 20th Assembly District, which encompasses the southern East Bay of the San Francisco Bay Area.

Prior to being elected to the Assembly in 2012, he was a Hayward City Councilmember and nuclear physicist.

After earning his Ph.D. in Astrophysics from Columbia at the age of 24, Bill became a postdoctoral fellow at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, where he published papers on Galactic Structure.

Upon returning to New York City, Bill joined NASA as a research scientist and developed the Goddard Institute Climate Model, which he used for some of the first studies of climate change. Bill left NASA to work at the management consulting firm, McKinsey and Company in New York City in their computer system practice. Bill then worked in the computer industry in Silicon Valley before settling into a career at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab (LLNL), where he established himself in the fields of atmospheric science and nuclear technology design. Bill became this country’s expert in nuclear programs in numerous foreign countries. Bill prepared reports for the Presidential Daily Brief and played a key role in the negotiations for the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. Teaching physics at Columbia, Caltech and UC Davis helped Bill formulate his lifelong interest in education.

Quirk was a physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Lab for 26 years 1979-2005. In 1996, he helped break the deadlock in the negotiations of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty In the early '90s, he also showed that the plutonium parts of nuclear weapons could be reused. This resulted in the closing of the Rocky Flats plutonium fabrication facility near Denver. This removed the threat of a major environment disaster in the Denver metropolitan area. There had already been a major fire at the facility that had threatened to spread plutonium oxide across the metropolitan area.


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