[1] David Band was born January 9, 1957, in Boston, Massachusetts to a Jewish family.
He got his MA in 1980 and his Ph.D. Physics at Harvard in 1985 in the title of "Non-thermal Radiation Mechanisms and Processes in SS 433 and Active Galactic Nuclei", supervised by Prof. Jonathan Grindlay.
He worked on the Burst and Transient Source Experiment (BATSE) that was part of the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory (CGRO), launched in 1991.
He also proposed the functional form (termed the Band-function) for the description of the prompt spectra of the gamma-ray bursts.
When NASA planned two new follow-up missions to CGRO, the Swift Gamma-Ray Burst Mission and Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope (formerly named Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST)) observatories, David Band seized an opportunity in 2001 to join the staff the Fermi Science Support Center at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC).