William Thomas Pecora
| William Thomas Pecora | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
February 1, 1913 Belleville, New Jersey, USA |
| Died | July 19, 1972 (aged 59) Washington, D.C., USA |
| Nationality | United States |
| Fields | Petrology, Geology |
| Institutions | US Geological Survey |
| Alma mater | Harvard University and Princeton University |
| 8th Director of the United States Geological Survey | |
|
In office 1965 – 1971 |
|
| Preceded by | Thomas Brennan Nolan |
| Succeeded by | Vincent Ellis McKelvey |
William Thomas Pecora (February 1, 1913 – July 19, 1972) was an American geologist.
Willam Thomas Pecora was born on February 1, 1913, in Belleville, New Jersey, son of Cono and Anna (Amabile) Pecora. Both parents were born in southern Italy, in the village of Sant'Arsenio. Pecora was the ninth of 10 children, four boys and six girls. His family was in the wholesale import business. In 1929, Pecora was awarded the Charles H. K. Halsey Scholarship that provided a $1,000 annual scholarship at Princeton University, where he majored in geology and geologic engineering; he was awarded a bachelor's degree in 1933. After graduation, he stayed on at Princeton as a geology tutor.
In the summer of 1934, he was a field assistant to Erling Dorf, working in Montana on Paleozoic stratigraphy. Pecora started graduate studies at Harvard University in 1935, concentrating on optical mineralogy and petrography. Pecora received a grant form the Holden Fund to finance fieldwork in 1937–1939 in the western fringe of the Bear Paw Mountains. His doctoral thesis was a petrologic study of the Boxelder laccolith. He received his Ph. D. from Harvard University in 1940.
Pecora was the United States intercollegiate fencing champion in 1933 and went to Germany at the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin as a member of the United States Olympic fencing team. He married Ethelwyn Elizabeth Carter from Franklin County, Kentucky on April 7, 1947. They had two children, William Carter Pecora born in 1949 and Ann Stewart Pecora born in 1953.
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