He was also an administrative assistant at the Manhattan Project's Los Alamos Laboratory and later one of its official historians.

[2] Hawkins attended Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, Connecticut, but left after his junior year to enter Stanford University.

[1] He initially studied chemistry, but then switched to physics before finally majoring in philosophy.

In 1938, Hawkins and his wife, Frances, joined the Berkeley campus branch of the Communist Party of America.

"[8] Hawkins saw his role as that of a go-between, mediating between the civilian scientists and the military leadership at Los Alamos,[2] but he also found a kindred spirit in the Polish mathematician Stan Ulam, who was working in Edward Teller's "Super" Group.

[11] Hawkins is credited with the selection of the Alamogordo area for the Trinity nuclear test,[1] but he declined to watch it.

[4] Together with Herbert A. Simon, he discovered and proved the Hawkins–Simon theorem on the "conditions for the existence of positive solution vectors for input-output matrices".

[8] The testimony of Hawkins and his wife Frances was released publicly in January 1951, resulting in an outcry led by The Denver Post.

There were calls for his dismissal, but he had tenure and, under the university's law, this could only be revoked for incompetence or moral turpitude.

[4] In 2013, the University of Colorado hosted an interactive exhibit in Boulder about his life and work, Cultivate the Scientist in Every Child: The Philosophy of Frances and David Hawkins.