July 26, 2010|By Jacques Kelly, The Baltimore Sun
David B. Greenberg, a retired professor of chemical engineering at the University of Cincinnati who was a Baltimore native, died Sunday of lymphoma at his Cincinnati home. He was 81.
Dr. Greenberg was a 1947 Polytechnic Institute graduate and earned a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering at Carnegie Institute of Technology, now Carnegie Mellon. He received a master's in chemical engineering from the Johns Hopkins University in 1959 and completed a National Science Foundation Fellowship at Stanford University's department of aeronautical engineering in 1961. He earned a Ph.D. in chemical engineering at Louisiana State University in 1964 and served on the faculty there for 10 years.
Dr. Greenberg was an active-duty Navy pilot from 1947 through 1949 and served as an assistant professor at the U.S. Naval Academy from 1958 through 1961.
Dr. Greenberg was an educator and researcher at the Naval Academy, Hopkins and Louisiana State before joining University of Cincinnati as head of the chemical engineering department in 1974. His research spanned the use of lasers in biomedical applications, hazardous waste treatment, and mathematical modeling and simulation of processes.
His family said that in addition to his career in engineering research and education, Dr. Greenberg was fascinated throughout his life by the mysteries of outer space and the potential for life elsewhere in the universe. He applied for the Apollo astronaut program and served as an expert consultant to NASA during the Apollo 13 period. In recent years, he taught courses on space exploration at the University of Cincinnati's Osher Institute for Learning in Retirement.
Services will be held at noon Wednesday at Sol Levinson and Bros., 8900 Reisterstown Road.
Survivors include three daughters, Lisa Akchin and Jill Greenberg, both of Baltimore, and Jan Evans of Cincinnati; and five grandchildren. His marriage to the former Helen Levine ended in divorce.
jacques.kelly@baltsun.com
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