In the early-1970s, this change of name so angered Felix Bloch that he blocked DeWitt's appointment to Stanford University and DeWitt and his wife Cecile DeWitt-Morette, a mathematical physicist, accepted faculty positions at the University of Texas at Austin.

[3][1] He received his bachelor's (summa cum laude), master's and doctoral degrees from Harvard University.

His Ph.D. (1950) supervisor was Julian S. Schwinger, a Nobel Prize-winning american theoretical physicist, best known for his work on quantum electrodynamics (QED).

Afterwards, DeWitt held a postdoctoral position at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, and worked at the Lawrence Livermore Lab (1952-'55).

[7] He pioneered work in the quantization of general relativity and, in particular, developed canonical quantum gravity,[8] manifestly covariant methods, and heat kernel algorithms.