Dr. Jim Toevs has been member of The Santa Fe Symphony Chorus for over ten years. He has also sung with the Santa Fe First Presbyterian Church Choir for many years. Prior to singing with these local groups, he directed the choir at Valley View Church in Española. Jim is also a trumpet player and held a principal trumpet role with the Los Alamos Symphony Orchestra for a total of 20 years. 

Jim has performed solos and duets with First Presbyterian Church and other churches in Northern New Mexico. A physicist, Jim was a professor at Hope College in Holland Michigan for the decade of the 70’s where in addition to physics he taught and consulted in acoustics. He joined Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1980 and conceived and developed one of the approaches to nuclear driven directed energy.  

Since the end of the Cold War. Jim’s work has focused on nonproliferation and sustainable arms control.  He has made nearly 50 trips to Russia, almost all working with the Russian nuclear weapons institute analogous to Los Alamos lab on defense conversion and job creation.

Jim also worked on instrumentation to detect clandestine trafficking in nuclear materials, and contributed with Russian and American colleagues to a book on two decades of cooperation between U.S. and Russian nuclear weapons laboratories and institutes. 

Jim and his wife Pauline lived in Chimayo for 11 years before moving to Santa Fe in 2004. They are dog lovers avid hikers.