Early Life, Science Career and Family
Diana J. Gabaldon was born on January 11, 1952, in Arizona, (U.S.A.). Her father, Tony Gabaldon (1931–1998) was an Arizona state senator from Flagstaff.. Her mother's family were originally from Yorkshire (England).
Gabaldon grew up in Flagstaff, Arizona. She earned a Bachelor of Science in Zoology from Northern Arizona University, 1970–1973, a Master of Science in Marine Biology from the University of California, San Diego, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, 1973–1975, and a Ph.D. in Ecology from Northern Arizona University, 1975-1978. Gabaldon received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters (DHL) degree from Northern Arizona University in 2007.
As a full-time assistant professor in the Center for Environmental Studies at Arizona State University in the 1980s, Gabaldon did research, was a scientific computing and database expert, and taught university classes in anatomy and other subjects. She was the founding editor of Science Software Quarterly. During the mid-1980s, Gabaldon wrote computer articles and software reviews for national computer publications such as Byte magazine, PC Magazine, and InfoWorld.
Gabaldon currently lives in the Phoenix, Arizona area with her husband, Doug Watkins; they have three adult children. After her first book deal was finalized, she resigned her faculty position at Arizona State University to become a full-time fiction author.
Read more about this topic: Diana Gabaldon
Famous quotes containing the words early, science, career and/or family:
“We are living now, not in the delicious intoxication induced by the early successes of science, but in a rather grisly morning-after, when it has become apparent that what triumphant science has done hitherto is to improve the means for achieving unimproved or actually deteriorated ends.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“Science is the only truth and it is the great lie. It knows nothing, and people think it knows everything. It is misrepresented. People think that science is electricity, automobilism, and dirigible balloons. It is something very different. It is life devouring itself. It is the sensibility transformed into intelligence. It is the need to know stifling the need to live. It is the genius of knowledge vivisecting the vital genius.”
—Rémy De Gourmont (1858–1915)
“Whether lawyer, politician or executive, the American who knows what’s good for his career seeks an institutional rather than an individual identity. He becomes the man from NBC or IBM. The institutional imprint furnishes him with pension, meaning, proofs of existence. A man without a company name is a man without a country.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“In the capsule biography by which most of the people knew one another, I was understood to be an Air Force pilot whose family was wealthy and lived in the East, and I even added the detail that I had a broken marriage and drank to get over it.... I sometimes believed what I said and tried to take the cure in the very real sun of Desert D’Or with its cactus, its mountain, and the bright green foliage of its love and its money.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)