David Brooks went to high school in North Carolina and majored in physics at Duke University. After graduating in 1963, he began work at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Langley Research Center during the height of technology development for the Apollo project. He started working on plasma propulsion and later turned to orbit analysis for Earth observing missions. During this time he wrote the first paper to analyze the potential for collisions with Earth-orbiting debris left over from launch vehicles and spacecraft. He performed the first calculations of viewing conditions for limb-scanning spacecraft -- an analysis used by the original Stratospheric Aerosols and Gas Experiment (SAGE) spacecraft. In the mid-1980's he worked on data analysis for the Earth Radiation Budget Experiment, and earned his PhD in Atmospheric Physics at the Imperial College of Science and Technology, University of London.
In 1988, Dr. Brooks left NASA and took a one-year visiting professor position at Drexel University in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science. Subsequently, he taught computer programming languages as an Adjunct Associate Professor and wrote three textbooks -- one on the symbolic algebra program Maple, one on Fortran 90, and one on the C programming language. In 1990 he became a Research Associate Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science.
In 1998, Dr. Brooks became a science Principal Investigator for the GLOBE Program, a worldwide environmental science and education program for K-12 students and their teachers. Along with colleague Forrest Mims, he developed several handheld instruments for monitoring the atmosphere -- aerosol optical thickness, water vapor, UV-A radiation, and solar irradiance. In this role, he has worked extensively with scientists, educators, and students in Europe, the Middle East, West Africa, southeast Asia, and the Caribbean. This work has been supported through the National Science Foundation and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
Following the breakup of the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science in 2002, Dr. Brooks moved to the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Mechanics as a Research Professor. In 2003, he wrote an extended set of notes on HTML and JavaScript for an introductory programming course for Biomedical Engineering graduate students. Those notes became the basis for a new HTML/JavaScript programming book published by Springer, a major international publisher known world-wide for its science-related publications. This book was published in the summer of 2007. (Springer has previously published his Fortran 90 and C textbooks.)
In 2004, Dr. Brooks founded a not-for-profit corporation, the Institute for Earth Science Research and Education, whose projects include development and calibration of inexpensive instruments for monitoring the atmosphere.
In 2006 Dr. Brooks developed an inexpensive pyranometer (an instrument for measuring insolation, the solar energy reaching Earth's surface). Also in 2006, Dr. Brooks began instrument and science education development work for the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration, in support of their educational outreach programs. Although this program has ended, schools in the Houston area reached by this program continue to report pyranometer data.
In the summer of 2007, Dr. Brooks left Drexel (although he retains a Visiting Research Professor title there) to spend full time working on Institute for Earth Science Research and Education projects. During 2006 and 2007 he visited Lao PDR once and Thailand twice, where he worked with Thailand's GLOBE Program office to improve science education.
During late 2007 and early 2008, Dr. Brooks finished another manuscript for Springer, on the server-side programming language PHP, and a new book on inexpensive atmospheric monitoring instruments. Both books should be available sometime during 2008.
Dr. Brooks lives in Worcester, Pennsylvania, a relatively rural northwest suburb of Phildelphia, with his wife Susan, daughter Laura, two cats, and a fox family that lives in the small long-abandoned quarry on their property. He has a fully equipped workshop for wood and metal working, and equipment for building and testing the atmosphere monitoring instruments he has developed. He plays classical piano and is especially fond of his rebuilt 6'4" Henry Miller grand, originally manufactured in the 1920's.