The Department of English and Technical Communication welcomes David Wright as a new Assistant Professor. Dr. Wright completed his PhD. last May at Oklahoma State University.
Dr. Wright shares this story of an unusual event:
Once, in South Dakota, I was caught between an wildfire and a massive thunderstorm. On the road ahead, we could see flames and massive amounts of smoke reaching the sky. Behind us was a wall cloud that looked like it covered the world. Since we couldn’t drive into the smoke and fire, we had to pull over and wait for the hail and rain that was creeping in behind to overtake us and extinguish the wildfire. Believe me, it was quite a wild ride. While there, we watched a mountain lion stalk an antelope across the valley below the road.
He adds, "Sounds like a tall tale, doesn’t it?" Whether tall or not, it’s a good tale.
Dr. Wright grew up in Oklahoma, where he learned to enjoy trout fishing, golfing, playing and recording music, and college athletics of all kinds. He has worked for NASA, the State of Oklahoma, in the software industry, and at one time was a member of a band that traveled a great deal and played lots of "really fine establishments." As part of his dissertation research into technology diffusion and as part of his work in the software industry, Dr. Wright visited livestock auctions from Texas to North Dakota (and everywhere in between) to research the cattle industry’s technological readiness for animal identification processes, both hardware and software.
I’m going to guess that many of those livestock auctions weren’t all that far from the "fine establishments" where his band played at an earlier stage of his life. The department is glad to have Dr. Wright join us; we hope you’ll meet him, perhaps in one of his classes or through reading his research.