Ozarks Profile: Steven D. Mullins, PhD

Tell us about your work.

(As one of two economists at Drury University), the lion's share of my work is teaching a wide variety of economics classes.

I also do consulting work in forensic economics. In civil cases, a plaintiff will claim damages associated with loss of future earnings and/or future medical expenses due to a personal injury or death of a spouse. Economists are used to provide estimates of the present value of such damages. I have worked on a wide variety of these cases ranging from a federal age discrimination case in which my testimony led to a multimillion dollar award, to county court cases involving auto accidents, marital disputes and workplace accidents.

What prepared you for this career?

I received my PhD in economics from Oklahoma State University in 1983. I taught as a graduate instructor there for two years, and I also taught during the summers at Texas Lutheran College.

I picked up the consulting work quite by accident. I was dabbling in microcomputers when I first came to Drury in 1982. This was pre-IBM, pre-Intel, pre-Microsoft. The dominant computer then was the Radio Shack TRS-80 and mine cost $750 then ($1,654.24 in 2002 dollars) after paying extra for the memory upgrade to 16 kilobytes (not 16 igabytes or even 16 megabytes!) of RAM. Anyway, one of my colleagues was doing economic consulting and asked me to write a program to help him crunch numbers, which I did. I gained valuable experience and picked up some clients to boot.

What sparked your interest in economics?

Economics is an exciting discipline. It is hard to pick up a newspaper or watch the evening news without coming across an economic issue or problem.

On a national level, how can we fight a war on terrorism, provide better health insurance coverage for seniors and the poor, deal with an impending funding crisis in Social Security, stimulate the economy with more tax cuts, and try to meet our international and moral obligations to protect the global environment ... all without breaking the bank?

These are critical social, political and ethical issues. Good answers to these questions require some understanding from many disciplines, and economics is one of them.

What's the best part of your job?

That's easy my colleagues and my students. Drury has grown by leaps and bounds since I arrived 20 years ago, but it is still small enough to avoid becoming impersonal. On any given day I will have conversations with chemists, physicists, mathematicians, philosophers, historians and political scientists.

The most rewarding part of teaching is when you see that you have made a connection with students and improved their ability to reason and solve problems. My research has focused on collaborative projects with students, and it is very rewarding to see them get as excited about economics as I am.

What are your spare-time interests?

I am an aviation nut, a passion I owe to my father who was a fighter pilot in the European theater of World War II. I built a small aircraft from a kit in 1993 and have been flying experimental aircraft ever since. I love spending weekends flying to Bolivar, or Springdale for lunch, and have yet to see anything as beautiful as the fall foliage as seen from 500 feet through a light ground fog along Table Rock and Bull Shoals lakes. Regina and I have flown to the Experimental Aircraft Association air show and convention at Oshkosh, Wis., many times, and we look forward to flying to Oshkosh again with Drury President John Moore who has just finished building an experimental airplane of his own.

I also enjoy racquetball and snow skiing.