Our beloved colleague and friend David J. Hollander passed away unexpectedly at his home in Gulfport, FL on September 26th, from complications of COPD. At the time of his death, David was a Professor of Marine Geochemistry at the University of South Florida College of Marine Science. Born in New York City in 1959, he was 61 at the time of his passing.
Dr. Hollander received his B.S. degree in Chemistry with a specialization in Earth Sciences from the University of California San Diego where he studied at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. His M.S. degree from the University of California Santa Cruz was in Earth Sciences and would set him on a path of understanding the history of the planet and its changes by studying the geochemistry of the sedimentary record. David would affectionately refer to himself during this time as a 鈥渟urf-rat.鈥� David moved to Europe in the mid-1980s and undertook a study of organic chemistry and nutrient cycling in Swiss lakes, receiving his Ph.D. degree from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, ETH in Zurich in 1989. Arriving in Zurich without knowing a word of German, let alone Swiss German, David quickly adopted the culture and customs of the country. His affinity for European languages and culture would serve him well throughout his professional and personal life.
After earning his degree, David completed post-doctoral research at the French Institute of Petroleum in Rueil-Malmaison, and then at the University of Indiana at Bloomington. In 1992 he accepted a position as Assistant Professor at Northwestern University, where he stayed until 2000, when he came to the 黑料老司机.
During his 20 years at USF, David directed research that was not only intellectually stimulating but also influential in affecting public policies concerning oceans and coasts. Indeed, his landmark study of the sediments in Old Tampa Bay identified fertilizer run-off as a major cause of eutrophication and loss of seagrasses. These findings led to the banning of the use of fertilizer seasonally in Pinellas County.
It was, however, in the last decade of his career and his life that his work was most impactful on national and global scales. The Deepwater Horizon oil blowout in the Gulf of Mexico was a tragedy both for the people affected and for the environment. It was also David鈥檚 clarion call to put his prodigious geochemical skills to use in helping to understand the impacts of that spill and other previous accidents in the Gulf of Mexico. As the Chief Scientific Officer of a multinational consortium of universities, David assembled a team of researchers from Mexico, Cuba, Germany, the Netherlands, Canada, Australia, and the United States to identify the unique aspects