Hello. My name is Charles Dermer. I was born in 1954 and grew up in Scottsbluff, Nebraska, 
a town in the western part of the state. Coincident with my 70th birthday, I ended a 17-month physics journey and completed Physical Demography, the physics of populations and human mortality. See overview here.
Beginning in 1972, I studied physics and philosophy at the Claremont Colleges, about 30 miles east of LA. I received a physics BS from Harvey Mudd College in 1977 and an experimental physics MA from Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, in 1979. I transferred to the University of California, San Diego in La Jolla, and there I changed fields and studied theoretical astrophysics under Professor Robert J. Gould.
I was awarded a PhD degree from UCSD in 1984. I did postdoctoral work at NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, from 1984-1986, and at Lawrence Livermore National Lab and UC Berkeley Space Sciences Lab from 1987-1991. I was research scientist at Rice University in Houston, Texas from 1991-1992 before joining the Space Science Division of the US Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC.
From 1992 until I retired, in 2015, I was head of the High Energy Astrophysics Theory Section in the High Energy Space Environment Branch at NRL. My research specialty was high-energy radiation from black holes, neutron stars, and supernovae. See Science.
Recently (2022-2024), I’ve been looking at some problems in statistics, mortality studies and demographic science. This research (May 25, 2023-October 12, 2024) culminated in Physical Demography (2024).
I wrote a short story (May 5, 2023) for our digital age here.
Thought I’d read a good book, so I chose the Bible. (May 2020-March 2022)
I have completed one album of music, Crole River and have two other albums, Xela and Orchids in Sunlight, in production. I also learned some music theory. See Music. (2016-present)