text: George Volkoff, a friend of Christy who was a year ahead of him at UBC, was  accepted as a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, by Robert Oppenheimer, who led the most active school of theoretical physics in the United States at that time. This inspired Christy to apply to the University of California as well. He was accepted, and was awarded a fellowship for his first year. At Berkeley he shared an apartment with Volkoff, Robert Cornog, Ken McKenzie and McKenzie's wife Lynn McKenzie. For his thesis, Oppenheimer had him look at mesotrons, subatomic particles called muons today, that had recently been found in cosmic rays. They were so-called because they were more massive than electrons but less massive than protons. With the help of Shuichi Kusaka he performed detailed calculations of the particle's spin. He published two papers on mesotrons with  Kusaka in the Physical Review, which formed the basis of his 1941 Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) thesis
  Manhattan Project
  Christy could have graduated in 1940, but could not then be a teaching assistant, and this would have left him jobless and without income. In 1941, Oppenheimer found him a post at the physics department at Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT). In May 1941, he married Dagmar von Lieven. They had two sons: Thomas Edward (Ted), born in 1944, and Peter Robert, born in 1946. IIT paid Christy $200 per month to teach 27 hours per week for 11 months per annum. To keep abreast of developments in physics, he attended seminars at the University of Chicago. This brought him to the attention of Eugene Wigner, who hired him for the same money that IIT was paying him but as a full-time research assistant, commencing in January 1942.