Following this, he enrolled at Caltech to study under Theodore von Kármán, director of the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory (GALCIT).
Sears earned his PhD in 1938, writing a thesis concerning airfoils in non-steady motion, a work that laid the foundations for future developments in that field.
[4] While a junior faculty member at Caltech, Sears directed the Civilian Pilot Training Program, a federal program that offered young people the possibility of earning a private pilot's license and receiving preparation for possible military flying in the event that the United States entered a war.
At the end of World War II, he accompanied a group of aeronautical experts led by Von Kármán to Germany to investigate the German progress in aerodynamics research.
[4] In 1974, after 28 years at Cornell, Sears joined the faculty of the aerospace and mechanical engineering departments at the University of Arizona.
During his lifetime, he received many honors and awards, including the Guggenheim Medal and in 1974 the Ludwig-Prandtl-Ring from the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Luft- und Raumfahrt (German Society for Aeronautics and Astronautics) for "outstanding contribution in the field of aerospace engineering."
He worked his way through college as a drummer in dance bands and, after moving to California, was tympanist with the Pasadena Symphony for several seasons.