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== Biography ==
David Keith Todd was born in 1923 in West Lafayette, Ind. The son of a professor of civil engineering at Purdue University, he skipped his last three months of high school in 1942 to enroll in the wartime academic program established by Purdue after the attack on Pearl Harbor. He spent one year at Purdue, then enlisted in the Army Air Corps and entered a 15-month cadet training program for meteorologists that had been established to help fill the military's urgent need for weather forecasters. After completing the program, he served in the Air Corps for two years as a weather forecaster.

After his discharge, Todd returned to Purdue, completing his studies in civil engineering in 1948. In 1949, he received a master's degree in meteorology from New York University. He joined the civil engineering faculty at UC Berkeley in 1950 and divided his time between studying and teaching courses in hydrology and fluid mechanics until receiving his Ph.D. in hydrology from UC Berkeley in 1952.

Todd's thesis, which examined how the water from floods in rivers percolated into groundwater, was considered an important advance and was widely used, said Robert Wiegel, UC Berkeley emeritus professor in civil and environmental engineering.

As the faculty member responsible for graduate courses in surface water and groundwater, Todd soon ran into a problem. The only groundwater textbook was 25 years old and out of print. He tackled the dilemma during a sabbatical leave in Europe in 1957. Supported by a National Science Fellowship, Todd spent the year reading, researching and writing his own textbook, "Groundwater Hydrology."

In 1961, President John Kennedy's science advisor asked Todd to join a team investigating waterlogging and salinity problems caused by high water table conditions in Pakistan's Indus Valley. Todd followed this project with numerous short-term assignments from the United Nations, teaching or consulting - usually during the summer term - in many foreign countries including Cyprus, Lebanon, India and Thailand.

In 1980, Todd retired from the university and turned his attention to Todd Engineers Inc., a small consulting firm specializing in groundwater that he founded in 1978. In his work with the firm, he championed the idea of perennial yield of groundwater basins. He served as chairman of the board and participated actively in the firm's consulting projects until late March of this year.  He retained the position of Emeritus Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Berkeley.

Todd has received wide recognition for his lifetime of work, including a Distinguished Alumnus Award from Purdue University, the John Hem Excellence in Science and Engineering Award from the National Groundwater Association, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Groundwater Resources Association of California. In 2005, he presented a keynote address to the 25th Biennial Groundwater Conference, providing a retrospective of 50 years of progress in groundwater management.