Dave Pruett

Dave Pruett was born in Durham, North Carolina and grew up in Bluefield, West Virginia. He received a B.S. in mechanical engineering from Virginia Tech and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in applied mathematics from the Universities of Virginia and Arizona, respectively, which enabled a career as a computational scientist and academic applied mathematician. That career includes a decade of experience in the aerospace industry at NASA Langley Research Center and three decades teaching mathematics and computational science at the university level.

For more than half his life—including time growing up in Bluefield and thirty years residence in the Shenandoah Valley—Dave has lived in the shadow of the Appalachian Trail. Hiking the AT in the Virginias (2025, George F. Thompson Pub.) is his account, in words and photographs, of the fulfillment of a retirement dream: section-hiking all 557 miles of the AT in the Virginias.

Dave is also the author of Reason and Wonder (2012, Praeger), a “love letter to the cosmos” twelve years in the making, which explores the nexus of science and spirituality. Reason and Wonder garnered an American Library Assoc. Choice Award in 2013.