David Porush is Executive Director of SUNY Learning Environments, responsible for technology and media initiatives serving the 64 campuses and 425,000 students of the State University of New York, the nation's largest comprehensive public university. LE is responsible for an array of intertwined programs and projects all aimed at keeping this vast university in step with the dynamic changes and impacts unleashed by new technologies on higher education in the U.S.

Porush is a former e-learning executive in the publishing industry and a media entrepreneur. From 1981 to 1998 he was Professor of Literature at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. While there, Porush developed and directed the nation's first degree program in electronic media, arts, and communication, served as founder and co-director of the artificial intelligence research lab, and director of the First-Year Humanities Interdisciplinary program. He is the author of three books, over fifty book chapters and journal articles, and dozens of reviews, plays, magazine articles, and a collection of short stories. From 1977-1981 he was an assistant professor of English at the College of William and Mary. He received a dual BSc from MIT in 1973 in biology and in literature and his Ph.D. in literature from the University at Buffalo (SUNY) in 1977.

At the Pusan
High School, Korea 2003

His book The Soft Machine: Cybernetic Fiction, was an influential and early study of cyberculture, published in 1985 and translated into Japanese in 1991. He has lectured widely in the U.S. and in Canada, the U.K., Holland, Denmark, Germany, France, Israel, Japan, and Korea  about the intersections of culture, science, and technology, their deep mutual histories and their promise for the future. His work has been featured on The Discovery Channel, Voice of America, in Omni Magazine, in The New York Times, and on NPR.

Porush has won several awards for teaching and research, including being named Distinguished University Teaching Fellow and Outstanding Professor of the Year at RPI. He is co-founder of The Society of Literature and Science, past executive of the Literature and Science division of the MLA, and served as an associate editor of two scholarly journals. He has been awarded grants from the Sloan Foundation, The Ford Foundation, the NEH, the Luce Foundation, FIPSE and others for research and creative collaborations. Porush was the senior Fulbright fellow to Israel in 1993-94, living there with his family and serving on the faculty of the Technion.