 Until his resignation in December 2012, in the wake of a conflict-of-interest controversy involving the geologist Charles G. Groat, Orbach was Director of the Energy Institute at the University of Texas at Austin.Orbach received a Bachelor of Science degree in Physics from the California Institute of Technology in 1956 and a Ph.D. degree in Physics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1960.Orbach began his academic career as a postdoctoral fellow at Oxford University in 1960 and became an assistant professor of applied physics at Harvard University in 1961.