You are here

Alumni Spotlight -- David Slusher

David Slusher photo

From Nebraska to Kansas to Georgia to Lafayette to Conway, SC. From chemistry to computer science. From shift chemist to software developer, developer evangelist, and podcasting pioneer. We think you will enjoy the article Local Tech Guru Is Also Podcast Pioneer in Myrtle Beach Online about UL Lafayette computer science alumnus David Slusher.

Here is a snippet to whet your appetite.

Slusher worked for pharmaceutical giant Merck & Co. for five years. "I was a shift chemist in a factory after college," he said. "It was the most blue-collar scientific job you could have - like going in at midnight and getting samples and doing liquid chromatography - but in this completely industrial setting. It was kind of grueling. If you had a bachelor's degree in the field of chemistry, you were effectively a technician. He later worked for a medical instrument company that was developing a blood gas monitor, and his role was one of analytical chemist. Slusher called this his transition job, because it was here that he started writing basic programs into test fixtures for the device. "I started talking to the firmware guys, and I decided that I liked their job better."

He said he had one of two choices: Go back to school and double down on chemistry or scrap chemistry completely and go for a different degree. Either way, he was going back to school. Slusher met his wife, Coastal Carolina University chemistry instructor Darlene Slusher while they were both undergraduates at Georgia Tech. "We were both chemistry majors, so we had some of the same classes," Darlene Slusher said. "We got married March 31, 1990, when we were seniors. We both graduated December 1990."

They moved to Lafayette, La., for a position she had taken as a field engineer with Schlumberger Limited, an oilfield services company. "When I accepted, I told them the one condition was that they had to send me somewhere that Dave could get a master's degree in computer science. They did a good job with that," she said. Slusher was impressed with the computer science department at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, and decided to go all-in. "Probably not many people think about UL Lafayette as a computer science powerhouse, but it's got a great department," he said. Within a month or two, he said he knew he had made the right decision.

Source: Local Tech Guru Is Also Podcast Pioneer, Myrtle Beach Online (Myrtle Beach, SC), April 30, 2016 1:00 AM