Richard Gerhardt Von Roseler was born in Brooklyn, New York on May 31st, 1952. He was raised by his paternal grandparents after his father was killed in the Korean War. In 1962, the Von Roselers moved to Buffalo, New York where Richard finished High School and graduated on the Honor Roll two years early in 1969. He then attended Cornell University and completed a Bachelor of Science degree in organic chemistry. Then he headed to Ames, Iowa to study for a Masters of Polymeric Chemistry at Iowa State University on a National Merit Award Foundation grant. By that time he was already fascinated with the new MOOG synthesizer music of Walter/Wendy Carlos, and wanted one of those room-filling machines to play with for himself. Sadly, he lacked the million or two that would have taken back then so he moved on west and began his first doctoral program at the University of Southern California where he recieved his PhD in Quantum Mechanic Physics during 1974, along with getting married. Then the military gobbled him up for the Vietnam war and he served as a Navy SEAL, mustering out as a Lieutenant Commander during late 1979. Then, still recovering from wounds he had recieved in Thialand, Richard went back to school one more time and took an ScD in Applied Laser Physics from Stanford University.
Finally, his student grant funds expended in the extreme, Richard took a job with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Pasadena, California doing Xray Astronomy at Kitt Peak Observatory in Arizona, began making babies, and bought his first ARP synthesizer in the primitive pre-MIDI days of MOS-FET transistors during the early 1980s. Then, while working with lasers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories in 1987, he bought his first MIDI-capable synthesizer - a Yamaha DX7 - and hooked it into his wife's Atari ST computer. Neverending musical bliss had finally arrived!
The rest, including the bulk of his child raising years and teaching career at the University of California at Santa Barbara, the end of his cold war era work at Sandia National Laboratories on bigger and better warclubs, his moving to Omaha, Nebraska under contract to the Strategic Air Command when it was undergoing reorganization to become Strat-Com just flew by in a blaze of ever-improving microcomputer technology. During which, Dr. Von Roseler never lost his love for making music or tinkering with high-tech toys.
He started a jazz band in Omaha known as Ravuk, and began playing alto and baritone saxaphone. Richard also became very involved with Omaha's emmy-award winning new age band, Mannhiem Steamroller, and became fast friends with that group's organizer, Chip Davis. Launching into a late-in-life apprenticeship as an audio engineer with Davis's Mormon Bridge Road Studios, Richard soon co-produced two of that group's Fresh Aire series of albums and even played back-up track synthesizer on them during studio remix sessions.
Today, Richard Von Roseler has come full circle. While still calling Omaha home and now tenured as Professor Emeritus of Applied Particle Physics at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, he is also working under contract to the Department of Energy's "BEV Bose-Einstein STAR research project" at the linear accelerator of Brookhaven National Laboratories on Long Island, New York. He calls it, "a helluva commute, but hopefully a gig that will hold me until retirement age when I can play music all the time."
