David L. Band, of Potomac Maryland, died on March 16, 2009 succumbing to a long battle with cancer. His death at the age of 52 came as a shock to his many friends and colleagues in the physics and astronomy community.
David showed an early interest and exceptional aptitude for physics, leading to his acceptance at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as an undergraduate student in 1975. After graduating from MIT in Physics, David continued as a graduate student in Physics at Harvard. His emerging interest in Astophysics led him to the Astronomy Department at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), where he did his dissertation work with Prof. Jonathan Grindlay. His Ph.D. (Physics) thesis in 1985 entitled "Non‑thermal Radiation Mechanisms and Processes in SS433 and Active Galactic Nuclei" was "pioneering work on the physics of jets arising from black holes and models for their emission, including self‑absorption, which previewed much to come, and even David's own later work on Gamma‑ray Bursts", according to Josh Grindlay who remained a personal friend and colleague of David's. Following graduate school David held postdoctoral positions at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, the University of California at Berkeley and the Center for Astronomy and Space Sciences at the University of California San Diego where he worked on the BATSE experiment that was part of the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory (CGRO), launched in 1991. BATSE had as its main objective the study of cosmic gamma‑ray bursts (GRBs) and made significant advances in this area of research. David became a world‑renowned figure in the emerging field of GRB studies. He is best known for his widely‑used analytic form of gamma‑ray burst spectra known as the "Band Function". At a recent GRB conference in Huntsville Alabama, a young gamma‑ray astronomer noticed his conference name tag and asked if he was really the person for whom the Band function is named. In fact David did much more, by providing important analysis of the GRB data which refuted previous claims for line features in their spectra and their distributions with respect to galaxies, which in part laid the foundation for their 1997 discovery as cosmologically distant objects.
After the CGRO mission ended, David moved to the Los Alamos National Laboratory where he worked mainly on classified research but continued to work on GRB energetics and spectra. When NASA planned two new follow‑up missions to CGRO, the Swift and Fermi observatories, David seized an opportunity in 2001 to join the staff the Fermi Science Support Center at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt Maryland. He was hired as the lead scientist for user support functions and to help to define and implement planning for the 2008 launch of the Fermi spacecraft. He brought a high level of energy and enthusiasm to the job, becoming in many ways the heart and sole of that organization. Neil Gehrels, the Goddard Astroparticle Physics Division Director and a Fermi deputy project scientist notes that "David was the perfect person for community support, with this outgoing personality and deep knowledge of astrophysics". David also became an important member of the Fermi science team; he was the lead author on one of the first significant gamma‑ray burst publications as well as making contributions to the burst detection and data analysis techniques. He was also involved with planning the EXIST mission, a candidate for a future NASA mission. He will be greatly missed by his many friends and colleagues within the Fermi mission and the gamma‑ray astronomy community.
