David M. Berube

David M. Berube is a professor of communication at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, North Carolina. His doctorate is from New York University and he has studied and taught communication and cognitive psychology for a quarter century. Since 2008, he directsing a program titled the Public Communication of Science and Technology (PCOST). PCOST has focused on consumer and public understanding of highly complicated science and engineering communication communication activities. He teaches limited graduate coursework (due to his grant responsibilities).

Prior to NCSU, he was a professor at the University of South Carolina, Columbia, South Carolina and was a lecturer at Weber State University (UT), Trinity University (TX), and the University of Vermont. During the last 30 years through 2007, he served as a national and international intercollegiate debating coach with many national records coaching over 40 formal national and international debating topics. He edited one of the most successful collegiate debate workbook companies in America and he is a coordinating editor with the Journal of Nanoparticle Research where he supervises social science methodologies. Currently, he serves on the US FDA Risk Communication Advisory Committee. These experiences and many others have provided him an incredibly broad exposure and understanding of many subjects and has made him the “outside-in” person who is recruited to deal with a host of interdisciplinary research activities.

After coaching two national championships at the National Parliamentary Tournament of Excellence in 2004 & 2005 and promoted to full professor, he returned to studying science and technology communication and cognitive psychology. This let him to participate as a principal investigator or co-principal investigator on a series of National Science Foundation grants examining how the public unpacks and makes sense of complicated technical information in emerging science, especially the field of nanotechnology. He has authored and co-authored many articles on risk perceptions associated with nanoparticles both quantitative and critical in nature. In 2006, he wrote Nanohype: The Truth Behind the Nanotechnology Buzz. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Press, 2005, 500 pp. In 2015 he broadened his interests to include public understanding of synthetic biology.

Berube has worked on a series of projects for the corporate world including Director of Communications for the International Council on Nanotechnology with partners including Intel, Swiss RE, Mitsubishi, L'Oreal, Procter & Gamble, etc. He has directed social media projects that produced White Paper level publications for the National Science Foundation and the International Food Information Council. He has directly consulted with Kraft Foods International on media protocols and has spoken as an invited lecturer to the Pentagon, Pharma, the Institute for Defense Analysis, etc. He has worked as a PI, CoPI, or investigator on approximately $5 million in grants and is now on a major NSA funded grant in the Laboratory for Analytical Science at NCSU where he serves on the Mission Enabling Workgroup and the Supply Line Workgroup. In addition, he is a current research fellow with the Genetic Engineering and Society Center at NCSU and is featured as the social and ethical coordinating in a major infrastructure grant application for the National Nanotechnology Initiative in a team headed by the Analytical Instrumentation Facility at NCSU.

Berube has consulted as a jobber with the Gerson Lehrman Group and others. He manages the Center for Emerging Technologies, LLC, a consultancy registered in North Carolina.