David Burris received the BS (double major) in Physics / Math in 1969, and the MS in Physics in 1972 from Southwest Texas State University. Early jobs as a physicist / electrical engineer included emergency shut-down systems for nuclear reactors, petrochemical process control, and applications in thermodynamics. The computational difficulties in solving thermodynamic problems lead to the Ph.D. in Computer Science from Texas A & M University in 1976.

Dr. Burris has also attained many professional designations from the Institute for the Certification of Computing Professionals (ICCP). Areas of interest include software engineering, translator design, data structures, design of programming languages, operating systems, database, steganography, and user level cryptography.