DAVID W. NORTON , Ph.D.
Past Arctic Editor, American Polar Society

Born in 1944, David W. Norton was infected at an early age by “high-latitude fascination” and, before finishing Grade 11 in high school in Massachusetts, was hired as a field assistant for an National Science Foundation (NSF) research project near the Arctic Circle in Interior Alaska.

After a second summer in Alaska, Dave entered Harvard College, spent his non-academic months as an undergraduate near the Equator in South America and returned to Alaska for graduate study in animal physiology at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks.

His plans to become an academic scientist were not fulfilled for a long time. As he finished graduate work

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(1973), the Trans-Alaska Pipeline (oil) was nearing approval for construction. Along with other Alaska biologists, Dave was drawn into serving as an “environmental cop behind a billboard” for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game and other cooperating agencies during the 1974-77 construction of the pipeline. There followed a seven-year stint as an environmental research manager while the U.S. federal government scrambled to lease Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) submerged lands to the petroleum industry for exploration drilling and production.

That stint was followed by seven years’ service as editor of the monograph series Biological Papers of the University of Alaska. By 1989, Dave had also taught for five summers with the Rural Alaska Honors Institute (RAHI) at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

In 1989, the Exxon Valdez oil spill resulted in another spate of what Dave calls an “ambulance-chasing” form of applied ecological research. After that experience—in fact, while Dave was out of Alaska seeking a combined teaching and research position in academia—he was invited to Barrow to found a Natural Sciences department with the young community college there. That position put a premium on Norton’s breadth of scientific experience—if not his depth—in making sciences appealing to undergraduate students.

Dave retired officially in 1999, but has continued dabbling in research, writing, teaching for RAHI, editing for the American Polar Society, and applied logistics, especially in the collaborative investigations of the dinosaurs of Arctic Alaska.