16/06/2026
⚙️FROM GEARS TO GENERATIONS ⚙️
What inspires a person to dedicate a lifetime to the study of gears, mechanisms, and motion? Perhaps it began as curiosity—a desire to understand how things work and why they move the way they do. For Dr. David B. Dooner, that curiosity became a passion, and that passion evolved into a remarkable career that has left a lasting mark on the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez and the field of Mechanical Engineering.
After earning his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Florida, and conducting research at both General Motors and the Russian Academy of Sciences, Dr. Dooner joined INME UPRM in 1994. For more than three decades, he distinguished himself as an educator, researcher, mentor, and colleague, becoming an integral part of the Mechanical Engineering Department and the Puerto Rican engineering community.
Throughout his career, Dr. Dooner taught and inspired generations of students in courses such as Mechanism Design, Machine Design, Vibrations, Advanced Kinematics, and Senior Capstone Design. His classes challenged students to think critically, embrace intellectual rigor, and appreciate the beauty and precision of engineering science.
Internationally recognized for his pioneering work in gearing kinematics, Dr. Dooner advanced the mathematical foundations of gear design and authored the influential book Kinematic Geometry of Gearing, a significant contribution to the field that continues to benefit researchers and engineers worldwide. A famous person in academics one said: "Gearing will be divided in two time periods: before Dooner and after Dooner" and that's just extraordinary.
To his students, however, Dr. Dooner will be remembered for much more than his scholarly accomplishments. His classes were legendary for transforming what he often called "common knowledge" 😂 into engineering problems that challenged assumptions and sparked curiosity. Whether estimating the cost of a slice of pizza, determining how many steps there are in "El Calvario" (a UPRM campus famous eternal stairs) to use that number to solve a problem, figuring out the average speed of a bee in flight, or wondering why a gear might have the same number of teeth as a human being, students quickly learned that engineering begins by observing the world around us. More than once, an exam question left an entire classroom counting their own teeth or questioning facts they had always taken for granted.
Those moments reflected one of Dr. Dooner's greatest gifts as an educator: his ability to teach students not only how to solve problems, but how to think.
The Department of Mechanical Engineering has been privileged to have a faculty member of Dr. Dooner's caliber among its ranks. While he arrived in Puerto Rico as a young engineer from Florida, he became one of our own, helping educate generations of engineers and contributing to the academic excellence that defines UPRM.
As he begins this well-deserved retirement, we thank him for his decades of service, his friendship, his scholarship, and his unwavering commitment to engineering education.
Dr. Dooner, may your retirement bring health, happiness, new adventures, and, in the words of our colleague and former department director, Dr. Fernando Plá (the one who hired Dr. Dooner), "Nunca perdamos la alegría de vivir."
Congratulations on an extraordinary career and a legacy that will endure generations!!! 💚
Antes, ahora y siempre...¡COLEGIO!
