all the while working as a physicist on contract to the Navy, and eventually for the Johns Hopkins University APL. At George Washington University he met Russian-Ukrainian physicist George Gamow, who subsequently took him on as his doctoral student. Gamow was a prominent Soviet defector and one of the luminaries on the GWU faculty. Alpher provided much needed mathematical ability to support Gamow's theorizing.

Alpher wrote his doctoral thesis, Origin and Relative Abundance of the Chemical Elements,