THE ODYSSEY OF A CHEMIST

It’s midday in Honolulu. A baby bird that HPU Professor David Horgen, Ph.D., found on his walk up Fort Street one morning is healing from its injuries in a cage behind his desk, its steady chirp echoing the deepest forests of the Amazon. Sunlight sneaks into his office and across the floor, and Horgen leans back at his desk, ready to share his extraordinary story of how he came to this life as a professor of chemistry at HPU. It was not always a clear path, and at times it seemed there was no path at all.

Horgen has taught and mentored many determined students who have gone on to prestigious universities across the globe to earn medical degrees, Ph.D.s, and other advanced STEM degrees. He has also educated students who were just like him: earnest, a little lost, trying to find their way through a confusing world. A Division I baseball player who traded cleats for the open road, Horgen lived a restless youth that ultimately led him to academia in the Pacific. His story speaks to students searching for meaning and direction at a highly formative age.

Born in Hollywood, Florida, just 10 miles from Fort Lauderdale, Horgen was raised in a close-knit family steeped in sports and education. He grew up near Cocoa Beach, in the shadow of the Kennedy Space Center, and something in the air there sparked his imagination to dream of travel and the limitless possibilities in life.

“I grew up watching the Apollo launches as a kid,” Horgen said. “It probably inspired a sense of adventure and wonder in me. I wanted to be a military pilot growing up, but I didn’t have perfect uncorrected vision, and I was also too tall for a fighter aircraft. One thing I knew, though, was I loved baseball.”

Horgen’s father coached basketball and later golf at Brevard Community College in Florida, eventually becoming an athletic director and golf coach at Centenary College in Louisiana. His dad, mother, sister, and brother-in-law all attended the University of Miami, and it seemed destined that Horgen would do the same.

“But the thing is, I wanted to actually play baseball, and the University of Miami had the number one team in the country at the time. So, despite being offered an academic scholarship, I decided to look elsewhere,” said Horgen.

He chose Brevard Community College, playing two years of baseball before transferring to Jacksonville University, a small private university that resembled HPU in several ways. A close campus community, the university had a Division I baseball program with a strong athletics culture.

In 1985, after two years in community college, at age 19, and with $400 to his name, Horgen got on his motorcycle and headed west. He had no destination, just a dream to see what lay beyond the horizon.

“If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there,” Horgen mused. Through Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona he rode, all the way to California and up the West Coast. He then drove north and across the Midwest to Minnesota.

“I was by myself, and I made my money go far,” he remembers. “I traveled for two months and 10,000 miles, and I eventually ended up unannounced at my grandparents’ door near the Minnesota-Canadian border with 16 bucks in my pocket. I washed cars, saved enough money over a couple of months to go back south.”

Back in Florida, Horgen decided to return to school for his junior year at Jacksonville University. The university had kept the door open for his return. But that year brought injuries: a baseball to the face, a sliced thumb ligament. By the end of his junior season, he was ready for a radical change. He left college for good. This time, he hopped on a plane across the Atlantic Ocean.

“I scrounged some money together and went to Europe,” he said. “I started in England, then Ireland, France, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, Italy. All on the train or hitchhiking. I spent four months there. I wanted to see the world, how other people lived. I remember growing up and always thinking the U.S. was the center of the world. I was really surprised by the magnificence of Europe, staying at hostels, sleeping on beaches, in fields, anywhere I could to see more places. It was a remarkable time.”

Even with Europe fresh in his mind, the pull of the baseball diamond proved irresistible. Back in Florida, he decided to walk on to the Florida International University (FIU) baseball team as a senior. Healthy again, he enjoyed a strong season. But graduation did not follow. Not yet.

After a year at FIU, Horgen discovered another unexpected skill. He tried his luck at selling water treatment equipment in Miami, where tap water is notoriously poor.

“I found out that I was pretty good at selling, a skill I never really knew I had,” he said. “I learned how to communicate, going door to door, meeting people from all walks of life. I built skills that have served me well ever since, and the discipline and work ethic I learned from college sports paid off.”

But the pattern of discovery and adventure continued. The horizon stretched a little further, this time to Brazil. He spent two months exploring the Amazon with a friend, diving headfirst into one of the most biologically rich places on Earth. When he returned to Florida, inspired by his close encounters with nature, his mind turned again toward science.

At FIU, he connected with a faculty mentor in plant biochemistry and got a chance to do undergraduate research. “That was pivotal,” he says. “Interacting with graduate students, working with a professor, doing my own research—it gave me a vision for what being a scientist could be like. I felt grounded, and I finally graduated after seven years.”

The road called once more. Unsure of his next move, Horgen leaned a large map against the wall in his garage, closed his eyes, and threw a dart. It landed on the Appalachian Trail in North Carolina. “And that’s where I went,” he said. “Just like that.”

What followed were months of wandering across the South and Southwest, eventually landing in Reno, Nevada. He worked for a bit as a bartender on a train that ran from Reno across the Sierra Nevada to the San Francisco Bay Area. By his own account, Horgen admits that he was “a horrible bartender… but it was a great experience.”

After nine months, he realized he needed more in life than odd jobs. “Months of wandering made me realize I didn’t want to be a bartender, or scuba dive for golf balls in golf course lakes, or sell things, or any of the other assorted jobs I’d had,” he said. “That’s when I decided to go to graduate school.”

Horgen returned to Florida, studied for the GRE, and applied carefully to graduate programs, reaching out directly to professors. “One of the best ways to get into graduate school is to find the faculty you want to work with in the lab,” he said. “You reach out to them directly. It is still the best way to find a graduate program. A lot of students don’t realize they should reach out to professors. In the sciences, graduate students are the lifeblood of any department. Faculty want to hear from students, and one of the most important predictors of success in graduate school is the ability to take initiative, reaching out and being clear about your interests sends that winning message.”

He enrolled at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he studied pharmacognosy (the study of drugs from natural sources) under the legendary Professor Norman Farnsworth. “Chicago was a great place to live, but a struggle in winter,” Horgen said. “Still, it was the best six years of my life, until the birth of my son. And I found I was good at science, and my background of school, sports, sales, and discovery prepared me well.”

Horgen’s last winter in Chicago crystallized the decision to move on for good.

“The very last place I lived at was on Taylor Street,” Horgen remembers. “Winters were always tough in the cheap apartments I could afford. I remember one morning, I scurried over to the bathroom, opened the toilet, and it was completely frozen over. That’s when I decided: that’s it! I’ve had it with winter. When I finished up my Ph.D. the next spring, I went West for good, only applying for positions in Hawaiʻi and Arizona.”

When spring arrived, Horgen headed to Hawaiʻi for a two-year postdoc at the University of Hawaiʻi as a marine natural products chemist, working for another legend, Professor Paul Scheuer. Horgen’s other childhood passion was the water, and he leveraged his chemistry skills to become an underwater scientist and taught his first organic chemistry courses in the summers.

As his postdoc wrapped up, he taught one semester at Chaminade University in fall 1999, right as a position opened at HPU in spring 2000. Horgen applied, was hired as a visiting professor of chemistry, and the next year was hired as regular faculty after a national search.

For more than a quarter-century, Horgen has been a professor at HPU, teaching organic chemistry, biochemistry, and more. His students have gone on to all sorts of medical and scientific careers. But many, like him, came to HPU unsure of their direction, later graduating with purpose and determination.

“I have a privileged life, working with great people, contributing to the development of young lives. I have a wonderful home, an amazing fiancée, an awesome son, and I live in the best place on the planet. There is nothing more than I could have wanted,” Horgen said.

Horgen’s rescued bird chirps a song in the background. From the Apollo launches of his youth to the hostels of Europe, from a frozen Chicago toilet to the warmth of Hawaiʻi’s shores, his nontraditional path has been anything but ordinary. His story reminds us that purpose is rarely found in a straight line. It is found in the unexpected turns, the setbacks, and the roads with the deepest silences.

Life can be an odyssey without a clear delineation of where we are flowing next, yet guided by the belief that our choices will lead us to peace in the end. For Horgen, the journey has always been the lesson, and for more than 26 years at HPU, he has passed it on like a sage, one student at a time.