Dr. David P. Clark did his graduate work on bacterial antibiotic resistance to earn his Ph.D. from Bristol University, UK. During this time, he visited the British Government’s biological warfare facility at Porton Down and was privileged to walk inside the Black Death fermenter. He later crossed the Atlantic to work as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Illinois and Yale University. Dr. Clark recently retired from teaching Molecular Biology and Bacterial Physiology at Southern Illinois University which he joined in 1981. His research into the Regulation of Alcohol Fermentation in E. coli was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, from 1982 till 2007. From 1984-1991 David was also involved in a project to use genetically altered bacteria to remove contaminating sulfur from coal, jointly funded by the Illinois Coal Development Board and the US Department of Energy. In 1991, Dr. Clark received a Royal Society Guest Research Fellowship to work at Sheffield University, England while on sabbatical leave.

Clark has supervised 11 master’s and 7 Ph.D. students and published approximately 70 articles in scientific journals. He has written or co-authored several textbooks, starting with Molecular Biology Made Simple and Fun (with Lonnie Russell; (Cache River Press, First edition, 1997). Other books are Molecular Biology (now in its 3rd edition) and Biotechnology (now in its 2nd edition).