Dr. José L. Mena-Werth [Image]

Photo by: Tim Skrastins, Antelope Newspaper, University of Nebraska at Kearney

Dr. José L. Mena-Werth

Associate Professor of Physics

Date of hire: 1992

B.S., University of San Francisco in San Francisco, California.
M.S., Ph.D., University of Washington in Seattle, Washington.
Dr. José L. Mena-Werth is our staff astronomer.
Take a multimedia WWW tour of our solar system. In addition to text, pictures, and sounds The Nine Planets contains references to many other Net resources relating to our solar system.
José Mena-Werth was born José Leonel Mena on November 29, 1949, in Granada, Nicaragua. Perhaps it was his birth year which inspired him to be a life-long San Francisco 49ers fan; or maybe it was because he moved there when he was two years old. His love of baseball, tennis, football and other sports was eclipsed by only two passions Star Trek (though enough of a Trekker to attend a convention at least he's never been caught dressed as a Klingon) and astronomy. His fascination with astronomy started with a visit to Santa's Village in 1959 where he decided to buy The Golden Book of Astronomy with the money he had been saving for a toy rifle that made a ricocheting sound. While a college student at the University of San Francisco, he started working as an usher at the Morrison Planetarium in Golden Gate Park. He soon became a lecturer there, known far and wide for converting people to Catholicism during the annual Christmas show. After receiving his Bachelor of Science degree from USF in 1971, he taught math, physics and Spanish for fourteen years at St. Ignatius High School. His last name changed to Mena-Werth when he married Jenny Werthimer in 1981 under the stars at the Morrison Planetarium. In 1985, he left his heart in San Francisco while the rest of him traveled to Seattle to start graduate studies at the University of Washington. He received his Master of Science degree at UW in 1989, the same year he received his daughter, Paloma. He received his Doctoral degree in Astronomy from the University of Washington in 1992. In 1993, he received his second daughter, Rosemary. Today, you will find him teaching and continuing his study of the atmospheres of stars at the Unversity of Nebraska at Kearney.

NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center seeks to expand our knowledge of the Earth and its environment, the solar system and the universe through observations from space.
IUE
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