David Jackson Cox

David Jackson Cox, a retired professor of biochemistry and university administrator, died of natural causes on October 14th, 2024, at the Bedford Court Healthcare Center in Silver Spring, Maryland. He was 89.

Dr. Cox was born in New York City and grew up in Washington, D.C., and Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, the son of Reavis Cox, an internationally recognized marketing authority and one-time chairman of the department of marketing at the Wharton School, and Rachel Dunaway Cox, a professor of psychology and director of the nationally prominent Child Study Institute at Bryn Mawr College. He was educated in Swarthmore’s public schools, and earned a bachelor’s degree at Wesleyan University, from which he graduated Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude in 1956. He obtained his Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of Pennsylvania in 1960, and, after completing a postdoctoral research fellowship at the University of Washington Medical School in 1963, was recruited by Dr. Lester Reed to join the faculty of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Texas. In 1973, Kansas State University hired Dr. Cox to head the university’s biochemistry department, where he devoted himself to expanding the department’s roster of faculty members and mentoring its cadre of graduate students. He remained at Kansas State, teaching both the core biochemistry curriculum and courses in the history of science, until 1989, when he left to became Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the Fort Wayne regional campus of the Indiana-Purdue University system. He retired in 2000, having authored or co-authored several dozen scientific papers - some involving early computer simulations of chemical processes that required writing his own computer code – and moved to Bellingham, Washington, where he lived until relocating to the Silver Spring area in 2018.

A lifelong outdoorsman, Dr. Cox spent many of his youthful summers rock climbing and mountaineering in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, the Northern Rockies in Canada, and the Cascades. During university holidays he often took his family on weeks-long camping and backpacking trips in Rocky Mountain National Park, while on weekends during the academic term he could often be found hiking and birdwatching in the Hill Country of Texas or the Flint Hills of eastern Kansas. During his time in Fort Wayne, he earned a private pilot’s license, and for several years enjoyed flying occasional weekend cross-county sorties throughout northeastern Indiana. In retirement Dr. Cox was an avid traveler, eventually visiting more than 100 countries and all seven continents on trips that he enjoyed preparing for, often with months of extensive reading, almost as much as the journeys themselves. To the delight of family and friends, he was also an accomplished stage performer, and over the years was a member of several community and semi-professional theater ensembles, including the company of Shakespeare Northwest in Mount Vernon, Washington. In a career highlight, he played the title role in Bellingham’s Stone Town Theatre Works’ 2009 production of King Lear.

Dr. Cox married the former Joan Narbeth, with whom he had three children, in Swarthmore in 1958. She died in 1982, at age 46. His wife of 39 years, Tamara Compton, preceded him death in 2022.

Dr. Cox is survived by his three sons: Andrew, and wife Patricia Cooper, of Washington, D.C.; Matthew, and wife Tanya Koropeckyj-Cox, of Gainesville, Florida; and Thomas, and wife Christine Freeburg, of Chicago, Illinois; a sister, Rosemary C. Masters, of Sleepy Hollow, New York; and three grandchildren.