David Deerfield, 1955

David Deerfield, a staff scientist at PSC since 1988, died at his home in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh on Sunday evening May 14. He was with his wife, Terrie, and his stepsons, Erin and Alex Payne.

David directed PSC’s biomedical program, renamed last year as The National Resource for Biomedical Supercomputing. He joined PSC to help implement this program almost from its inception in 1987, when it was established as the first biomedical supercomputing program in the country external to NIH. He assumed leadership in 1992 and was instrumental in PSC’s program becoming a nationally prominent resource for training and research in applying high-performance computing to the life sciences. During David’s tenure, the program tripled in budget and quadrupled its full-time staff.

Ralph Roskies, PSC co-scientific director, sums up David’s contribution at PSC as follows:

David had infectious enthusiasm, and an ability to engage people. He quickly developed into the leader of the biomedical group, and generated great loyalty within his group. He had a passion for teaching, especially traditional underserved populations. His scientific area was quantum chemistry. To understand how to interpret his results, he developed several visualization techniques and particularly animations. From there, he went on to consider the power of other visualization techniques, such as developed in the Visible Human browser. He loved PSC and what it had accomplished, and embodied its can-do spirit. Whatever we needed, he signed up to do, even if it had little to do with his particular scientific area of interest.

Through his work at PSC, David helped train thousands of researchers in workshops and training programs at PSC and on-site at universities around the country, including Puerto Rico. David, says his colleague Troy Wymore, was particularly adept at facilitating students and his staff to think about problems in novel ways and to consider approaches they might have previously thought to be impossible. He took the initiative in establishing PSC’s MARC (Minority Access to Research Careers) Program — a two-week summer intensive at PSC that trains faculty and staff at MARC-eligible institutions.

Photograph by David Deerfield. Puerto Rico, 2003

This statement, from Ricardo Gonzalez Mendez, Professor of Radiological Sciences, University of Puerto Rico School of Medicine, exemplifies the kind of response David elicited from people he taught:

I am deeply grateful to David, for he gave me an opportunity to get back into research after a period where it appeared it was at an end for me here in PR. His friendship was one of the bright spots of my life, personal and professional, over the last few years. His commitment to getting HPC and biocomputing to minority schools was also a great example of what kind of a person he was. Hopefully, we can continue this work as part of David’s legacy to all of us and to society. I know I will try to go on with it. I will miss him, with his wonderful sense of humor, immensely. He helped me become a better scientist and a better human being, and for that I will always be grateful.

David’s close friend, PSC biomedical scientist Hugh Nicholas, who came to PSC at the same time as David, offered these personal recollections that provide an overview of David’s background:

Photograph by David Deerfield. Wheat stalk, Kansas.

David was born in Kansas and grew up there, largely in Wichita. His father's family was from West Virginia and he said he was related to both the Hatfield and McCoy clans of feuding fame through his father. His mother's family was from Texas, concentrated in the small towns north of San Antonio. David's father died not too long before David came to the PSC, his mother some time before that.

After Wichita, David went to the University of Kansas, in Lawrence where he became a life-long Jayhawks basketball fan and relaxed by watching tornadoes skip across the horizon during the late afternoons of the springtime. During his spare time away from these lifelong avocations, he also completed a chemistry degree. On the pioneering road-show tour to the Midwest, David took his PSC cohorts on the tour to visit the Hawk and the Wheel, two popular undergraduate hang-outs from his stay in Lawrence.

After Lawrence, he moved to Minneapolis and the University of Minnesota where he got a Ph.D. in chemistry and more acquaintance with cold weather than he really appreciated. After Minneapolis, he took a postdoctoral appointment at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he formed a life-long very close personal and professional relationship with Professor Lee Pedersen who was his post-doctoral advisor and long-time collaborator. He also took up the only avocation that could ever compete with being a Jayhawk basketball fan, being a Tar Heel basketball fan.

One formative experience was spending summers working on a cattle ranch in the Oklahoma panhandle as a teenager, where he gained an appreciation for what hard work really means. He also gained a lasting love the austere high deserts of the American Southwest. This kind of landscape, especially around Santa Fe, New Mexico remained some of his favorite scenery. He could take endless pictures capturing the striking features of this part of the country, especially the sunsets. His love for this part of the country was the origin of the pepper wreath that has graced his office door the past several years. The other region that came strongly to appeal to him was a rugged beach, a mixture of rock and sand with vegetation growing right down onto the beach. Rincon Beach on the west coast of Puerto Rico became one of his favorite spots to visit.

David was diagnosed with a cancer, chondra sarcoma, on May 13, 2005. The disease was vicious. He fought a valiant fight and displayed fortitude and unfailing humor with friends and colleagues throughout his decline.

He and Terrie Payne Deerfield, an artist and art therapist who was his longtime friend and companion, were married on July 16, 2005. For this backyard potluck event with 66 friends, David wore a cowboy shirt and hat, says Terrie, with her dressed as a Spanish senorita. “The cowboy was part of his personality that PSC people may not have known, since they saw him either dressed up for meetings or in sweatpants and T-shirt.”

For many of us at PSC, some of whom remember David - it seems only a few years ago — as the captain and driving force of the PSC softball team, David was a forceful, sometimes irritating, but nevertheless likable, very human personality — a “sweet curmudgeon” in his wife’s words - who allowed his humanity to be part of his daily interactions on the job. This touched us and we won’t soon forget.

A memorial service is planned for Thursday, May 18, to be followed that evening, in a manner befitting David, by a New Orleans style funeral celebration. “David didn’t want a funeral,” says Terrie, “he wanted a party.”

David is survived by Terrie, his stepsons Erin and Alex Payne, a stepdaughter, Kelly Laseter of West Virginia, and two first cousins, Seaton Maggard of Gainesville, Florida, and John West of Chicago.

David W. Deerfield II