David's Personal Info
WHERE I GREW UP
River Falls, Wisconsin, a sister city of Lake Wobegon with about 10,000 residents and
some rather disturbing shopping opportunities (see photo above). Sometimes I think I should send this in to
Letterman.
WHOM I MARRIED
I met my wife, Gretchen, in ballet class at the Durham Arts Council. We danced the
tango at our wedding. I'm not making this up.
WHO'S REALLY IN CHARGE
Carl and Ingrid, of course. Mmm, popsicles!
WHERE I'VE DONE PHYSICS
- Gustavus Adolphus College, a small, private, liberal arts school in the small town of
St. Peter, Minnesota. Undergraduate research with Dr. Steve Mellema in experimental nuclear physics, including
two weeks at the tandem van de Graaf accelerator at UW-Madison. (Gustavus and St. Peter were in the news in late
March of 1998; both the town and the school were almost wiped off the face of the earth by a monster tornado, an
F3 or F4 on the Fujita
scale, with winds exceeding 200 mph in a one and one-quarter mile wide swath).
- Duke University, in the Physics Department's Quantum Electronics lab, with Dr. Daniel
Gauthier as my advisor. My research was on controlling or manipulating chaos in a high-speed circuit and
an unstable semiconductor laser, work that culminated in a dissertation titled "Experimental Control of Instabilities
and Chaos in Fast Dynamical Systems."
- Air Force Research Laboratory, on Kirtland AFB in Albuquerque, New Mexico, for two years
as an NRC postdoc under the mentorship of Dr. A. Gavrielides, studying instabilities and control techniques in
semiconductor lasers.
WHAT ELSE I ENJOY
- Choral
music. It's something my undergraduate institution prides itself on.
- Modern dance and ballet (curiously, there were several dancing physicists in my graduating
class in college; our dance professor referred to us as her "Budweiser Ballerinas")
- Tom Stoppard's Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
- Coen brothers movies
- Garrison Keillor
- Volleyball, and the application of Bernoulli's Principle thereto
- ACC hoops
- Too Much Coffee Man
Last updated 20 April 2006