David L. Kirchman

David Kirchman was born and raised in a West De Pere, small town near Green Bay, Wisconsin. He received a B.A. in Biology from Lawrence University and the Ph.D. from Harvard University. After postdoctoral work at the University of Georgia and the University of Chicago, he moved to the University of Delaware where he eventually became the Maxwell P. and Mildred H. Harrington Professor of Marine Science. After retiring in 2020, he is now an emeritus professor at Delaware. His work took him to the Arctic Ocean and Antarctica and many oceans in-between. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology (affiliated with ASM), the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography (ASLO), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He is author of "Dead Zones: the Loss of Oxygen from Rivers, Lakes, and the Oceans" and “Microbes: The Unseen Agents of Climate Change.” The third edition of his textbook, “Processes in Microbial Ecology,” written with Ashley Shade, was published in July 2026 by Oxford University Press.