R. H. Riffenburgh, PhD, Professor Emeritus in the Mathematics and Statistics Department at San Diego State University, is pursuing a retirement career as a fiction writer. Winner of the Odin Writers Award, he has published nine short stories, three poems, and a novel, Thank Ye, Mister Sun. In this novel and literary portrait of depression-era Appalachia, many of the incidents occurring from the author’s childhood in Appalachia in the 1930s, where his dad, raised on a Colorado ranch, had become a PhD chemistry professor at Virginia Tech.

The author has also written two novels in a series of realistic thriller adventures, on undersea threat and survival and on extortion in the world of fine art authentication, and 50 short stories. He proposes to publish the first of the series, A Theft of Sanity, and an anthology of the short stories, Adventures in This Strange World, by the end of 2026.

Before retirement from the scientific world in 2021, he published four editions of a leading medical textbook, Statistics in Medicine (Elsevier), published 165 scientific articles, and edited two scientific journal series. From the 1950s to 2021, he was variously a professor, a company CEO, a government scientist, an oceanometrician, a Navy undersea diver, an ocean sailor, a NATO officer in Europe, and a medical research planner/analyst.

He was wed to the renowned artist, Gerrye Riffenburgh, from 1952 until cancer took her in 2016. They had five children and seven grandchildren. He lives and writes in San Diego, a mile inland from La Jolla Shores beach.