In March 2002 Raymond Orbach became director of the Office of Science at the Department of Energy, the third largest federal sponsor of basic research in the U.S. Before assuming this post, he had served for 10 years as chancellor of the University of California, Riverside. During his tenure there, enrollment at UC Riverside grew from 8,805 to more than 14,400 students, with corresponding growth in faculty and facilities. In addition to his administrative duties at Riverside, Orbach maintained an active research program in theoretical and experimental physics, and even taught a freshman physics course each winter quarter. After receiving his BS from Caltech, Orbach went to UC Berkeley for graduate study, receiving his doctorate in 1960. He held a one-year postdoctoral fellowship at Oxford University, and became an assistant professor of applied physics at Harvard in 1961. He joined the faculty of UCLA two years later. From 1982 to 1992 he served as the provost of UCLA’s College of Letters and Science. Orbach is the author of more than 240 scientific articles, and has received two Sloan Foundation fellowships, an NSF Senior Postdoctoral Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, among many other honors. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.