About the Director

Planetarium Director Feared the Night Sky, but Not For Long

John C. Wells Planetarium director William Alexander was five or six years old when the night sky made its first impression.

It was a crisp, clear night and his father told him to look at all the stars. It wasn't exactly a foretelling experience.

"I remember I was scared, which is funny now, but it was a new experience," says Alexander, a member of the JMU physics faculty since 2001 and director of the planetarium since 2007. "I had never seen a sky that dark and so many stars."

It didn't take the Huntington, W.Va., native long to lose his fear of the sky and to gain a keen interest in what was out there. He remembers NASA representatives visiting his second-grade class and launching model rockets. News of Apollo moon landings and the Skylab program also fueled his interest. Carl Sagan's television series "Cosmos" sealed the deal, he says.

Alexander took his first astronomy class in the eighth grade and realized he would have to take all the physics, chemistry and math he could. After getting a bachelor's degree in physics from Bethany (W.Va.) College he went to work-as a research chemist for a petroleum company, which had nothing to do with astronomy. The job wasn't exactly what he wanted to do and so he started teaching evening classes at a university. That was a more enjoyable experience that enabled him to get back to his real interest, astronomy.

"Eight years into my reinvented career, I don't really think of what I do now as work," says Alexander, who also has a master's degree in physics from Marshall University and is completing a doctorate in science education at the University of Virginia.

Running the planetarium and sharing his interest in astronomy with JMU students and the general public has had its rewards.
"You have little breakthroughs," he says. "One time we had a group here and one of the children stuck around after most everyone had left. He asked me, 'If you believe in the big bang, does that mean you can't believe in creation?' I just looked at him and said, 'You can believe in both. Lots of people believe in both.' And it almost seemed like a spark went off. That one doesn't have to exclude the other.

"A common way of thinking at a university is you can have two viewpoints that are equally valid and one doesn't exclude the other. Who knows. Maybe that will be an influential interaction later on in his life."