About David A. Verbree

Curriculum Vitae

EXPERIENCE

• 2006, 1997 - Mayzon Building Services Group (BSG) - Rochester, New York
  • Commercial/Industrial Carpenter
  • Built and expanded buildings for a major media/entertainment corporation, other construction projects for universities, and other commercial businesses
  • Renovated warehouses into a school, police station, shopping mall, and office space
• 2004-present - Verbree International - Grandville, Michigan, Webster, New York, & Burkina Faso, West Africa
  • Founder and Executive Director
  • Non-profit/non-governmental organization initiating grass roots agricultural development projects in Burkina Faso, West Africa
  • Incorporated organization and received 501(c)(3) IRS tax-exempt determination
  • Wrote grant proposals and conducted fundraising activities
  • Established logistics and mobilized to Burkina Faso, West Africa
  • Conducted assessments in remote villages
  • Wrote official organizational documents and policies
  • Maintained financial records and filed reports with IRS
• 2003-2005 - DornerWorks Ltd. - Grand Rapids, Michigan
  • Engineer Contractor
  • Contracted to Smiths-Aerospace (now GE Aviation)
  • Designed spatial and temporal partitioning-safe file system for flash and RAM devices for aircraft flight management systems under VxWorks AE
  • Designed NVM and Signal drivers
  • Worked on 429, 1553, and serial communication drivers for aircraft computers under VxWorks AE
  • Maintained lab resources
• 2002-2003 - Shelter for Life International - Herat City and Taloqan, Afghanistan
  • Program Manager/Program Developer
  • Administered the following grants:
    • USAID/OFDA AOT-G-00-00-00259-00 - Constructed 4,200 one-room shelters for Internally Displace Peoples, 1,050 kitchens, latrines & bath houses, dug 88 drinking water wells in Herat province. Also rehabilitated over 100km of primary routes in Ghor and Badghis provinces in order to maintain access to vulnerable populations throughout the winter.
    • USAID HDA-G-00-03-00011-00 - Assisted 1,956 families in Herat City by providing a winterized living space.
  • Administered offices in Herat, Ghor, and Badghis Provinces
  • Administered budgets totaling over 4 M USD funded by USAID, OFDA, World Bank, and World Vision International
  • Wrote proposals totaling over 12 M USD
  • Performed project monitoring and reporting
  • Carried out surveys and assessments in remote villages
  • Managed a team of over 40 national engineers and support staff

• 1998-2002 - Smiths Industries-Aerospace (now GE Aviation) - Grand Rapids, Michigan
  • Engineer
  • Designed flight simulators to train pilots and test flight management systems products
  • Designed device drivers for aeronautical busses and embedded systems
  • Designed data acquisition and analysis tools for flight data
  • Designed network protocols for distributed simulations and remote data-loading
  • Designed file systems for embedded flight management computers

EDUCATION

• 2009-present - Texas A&M University - College Station, Texas
  • Ph.D., Agronomy - expected Fall 2011
  • Diversity Fellowship and partial assistantship
  • RESEARCH:
    • Identifying the physiological mechanisms of drought tolerance in cowpea
  • TEACHING:
    • Two lab sections of Soil Science

• 2007-2008 - The Pennsylvania State University – University Park, Pennsylvania
  • M.S., Agronomy
  • Research Assistantship
  • RESEARCH:
    • Evaluated nutrient and sediment losses in runoff using rainfall simulations on tilled and no-till cropland and on soils with varying drainage properties.
    • Evaluated nitrogen fertilizer use efficiency on tilled and no-till cropland on soil with varying drainage properties.
  • Taught Introduction to Soils lab

• 2005 - Centre de Formation des Adultes en Langues et Cultures – Burkina Faso, West Africa
  • Studied French intensively (5 hrs/day) for four months

• 2002 - NCI Associates – Grand Rapids, Michigan
  • Builder's License Training Course

• 2002 - Grand Rapids Community College - Grand Rapids, Michigan
  • Building Codes and Standards

• 2002 - Smiths Aerospace - Grand Rapids, Michigan
  • Ada '95

• 2001 - State University of New York - Binghamton, New York
  • Image Generator Design
  • Flight and Ground Vehicle Simulations

• 2000 - The Learning Tree - Grand Rapids, Michigan
  • Advanced Microsoft Foundation Class

• 1995-1999 - Calvin College - Grand Rapids, Michigan
  • B.S., Computer Science - Software Engineering
  • LINGUISTICS: three semesters of French, one semester of Greek

• 1993-1995 - Webster High School - Webster, New York
  • Regents Diploma
  • LINGUISTICS: three years of French

MEMBERSHIPS

• American Society of Agronomy since 2007
• Crop Science Society of America since 2007
• Soil Science Society of America since 2007

LANGUAGE SKILLS

• English (fluent in verbal and written) – primary language
• French (intermediate in verbal and written) – studied in US and in Burkina Faso, West Africa.
• Persian (beginner in verbal) – acquired living and working in Afghanistan
• Greek (beginner in written) –- studied one semester of Classical Greek

COMPUTER LANGUAGES

C, C++, Visual C++, C-Sharp, SPARC and Motorola assembly, Java, Ada, PHP, Perl, JavaScript , SQL, HTML

OPERATING SYSTEMS

UNIX variants, Linux, VxWorks AE, LynxOS , MS Windows and DOS variants

OTHER COMPUTER EXPERTISE

• Designed and implemented ActiveX controls for aircraft instrument simulation
• Designed and implemented device drivers for Linux, VxWorks AE, and LynxOS
• Graphics programming in OpenGL , DirectX and GDI
• Manipulation and viewing of terrain data and GPS mapping with ArcView GIS and custom software
• Designed and implemented statistical analysis software in C-Sharp, C++, and PHP
• AutoCAD 2000
• Tornado AE653 Programming Environment
• MS-Access and MySQL databases
• Apache web servers

-- DavidVerbree - 2010-01-21