NEW HAVEN, Conn. (AP) – Nuclear physicist D. Allan Bromley, a Yale University professor and an architect of U.S. science policy during the administration of President George H.W. Bush, has died, a Yale spokeswoman said. He was 79.

Bromley died of a heart attack Thursday afternoon, shortly after teaching a class, the university said.

As then-President Bush’s top science adviser from 1989 to 1993, Bromley pushed for sizable increases in funding for scientific research in a race to keep U.S. manufacturing ahead of Japan and Germany.

He supported the expansion of the high-speed network that became the Internet and, after questioning the science behind global warming for years, he was credited with ultimately persuading Bush to attend a summit on the issue.

“Alan was a giant in science and technology policy,” said Michael Boskin, who served as chairman of Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers. “He got all of us to think long and hard about what the appropriate role should be in funding research and development.”

Serving both as Bush’s science and technology adviser and as chairman of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, Bromley was seen as one of the most influential science advisers ever.

“He did have the president’s ear,” John H. Sununu, Bush’s former chief of staff, said Friday. “He understood that the decisions were the president’s, but he gave the president his best advice rather directly. That made him a superb adviser on hard issues.”

Bromley was an early champion of what he called the “data superhighway,” and later became the Internet.

“Ten years from now,” Bromley said in 1991, “I’d like it to be widely available and looked upon like the telephone network.”

“It originally was a network of seven or eight universities,” Sununu said. “He understood its value, both as a medium for exchanging information and as a medium to create a global means of communication.

Born in Ontario, Bromley became a U.S. citizen in 1970 under some unusual circumstances.

“I had been shown the deepest, darkest secret known in the United States out at the Weapons Flats in Nevada. And just about the time it was all finished, someone said, Oh my God, Bromley is not a citizen,”‘ Bromley recalled in a 1992 interview with the Toronto Star.

A judge was dispatched and Bromley was hurriedly sworn in, he said.

Before being appointed to the Bush cabinet, Bromley sat on President Reagan’s White House Science Council and served as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 1988, he received the National Medal of Science, the nation’s highest scientific award.

Recently, he criticized the current Bush administration for cutting funding for the sciences.

“Congress must increase the federal investment in science,” he wrote in a 2001 New York Times editorial. “No science, no surplus. It’s that simple.”