The “unofficial” biography of Dr. David J. Burdige

Dr. Burdige was born in New York City sometime in the last century, the same year that Johnny Cash’s “I Walk the Line” reached number 1 in the Billboard charts. After an uneventful high school experience mostly playing bassoon and going to peace demonstrations, he went off to college and has remained institutionalized (academically speaking) ever since, at Swarthmore College, University of California at San Diego, University of North Carolina and finally Old Dominion University. He is currently a professor and eminent scholar in the Department of Ocean and Earth Sciences at ODU (with a joint appointment in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry). In 1996 he was a visiting scientist at the Southampton Oceanography Centre (UK). Because he has a short attention span, his research interests have wandered over the years from manganese and iron geochemistry to studies of dissolved organic matter in marine sediments to studies of seagrass-sediment interactions in tropical carbonate sediments (with a few other stops along the way). In his free time, he likes to garden, read mystery novels and listen to Internet radio stations (KPIG and WFUV being his current favorites).