Acadia Senior College

David Dawson has a BS in Electrical Engineering and a PhD in Biology from the University of Pittsburgh and conducted postdoctoral research at Yale University. In the last 40 years, he has taught Physiology, Biophysics, and Pharmacology to medical and graduate students at the University of Iowa, the University of Michigan, and the Oregon Health & Science University where he was Chair of Physiology and Pharmacology.

He also lectured at The MDI Bio Lab, where he was Scientific Director for six years. Since his retirement in 2014, he has spent much of his time on music, but he has also taught grant writing at The MDI Bio Lab and The Jackson Lab. He has no formal background in Economics but has always been curious about its inner workings, in particular the differences between Economics (the so-called “Dismal Science”) and the natural sciences that he has spent his life pursuing. Dawson has been studying the history of Economics and Political Economy intensively for the past seven years and has taught three courses in the Acadia Senior College, most recently an introduction to Modern Monetary Theory. His goal is always to review economic ideas in historical context and present them in a way that is understandable to the non-expert.