Dennis P. Waters received his Ph.D. in 1990 from the Watson Engineering School at Binghamton University, where his advisor was Howard Pattee.
Rather than travel the academic road, Waters became a serial entrepreneur, founding and selling several technical publishing businesses. His most recent (GenomeWeb.com, sold in 2019) reached a monthly audience of 300,000 life science researchers around the world. Highlights of Waters’s media career include:
- Program Director at first commercially successful jazz radio station, WRVR-FM New York (1976-78)
- Published first newsletter on satellite radio (1984)
- Launched first newsletter and industry conference on wireless data communications (1988-92)
- Started first news service on the business of foreign exchange trading (1990, still being published)
- Issued first market reports on digital road mapping and electronic toll collection (1991-93)
- Trained thousands of fintech practitioners in New York and London on the intricacies of real-time financial market data and trading floor networks (1990s). His eponymous magazine on the subject is still published.
- Launched first online news services on bioinformatics and genome sequencing (1997)
Since retiring from business, Waters has returned to the research project that inspired his Ph.D., how one-dimensional patterns of DNA, language, and computer code orchestrate the behavior of the three-dimensional world in which we live. This has resulted in Behavior and Culture in One Dimension.
Waters is a lichenologist and Visiting Scientist in the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Natural Resources at Rutgers University. He has published peer-reviewed research on the lichen flora of the Mid-Atlantic Region.
Waters was appointed as Municipal Historian by the Township Council of Lawrenceville, NJ, where for twelve years he conducted research and presented his findings on a range of local topics from the colonial period to the 20th century. He has served on several non-profit boards, including Birds of North America, Liberty Science Center, the Lawrence Township Environmental Education Foundation, and the Lawrence Historical Society.