Duben is the Dean of the College of Sciences and Mathematics of the Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Texas. He took this position after he retired as professor emeritus of computer science from Southeast Missouri State University, where he spent 22 years, rising from assistant professor to professor, and serving as associate dean of the College of Science and Mathematics and as chairman of the computer science department.

He studied chemistry and mathematics for his BS from Marquette University in Milwaukee. His PhD, in physical chemistry, is from the Pennsylvania State University. He was, and is, particularly interested in computational chemistry. His early exposure to computing was on an IBM 7094 using Fortran II, and he completed his dissertation research on an IBM 360. At that time, he discovered that a person could make a lot of friends if he knew OS360 JCL.

His interest in computational chemistry took him from large quantum mechanical calculations into statistical mechanical studies of glycoprotein geometries, as well as into instrument construction and computerized data collection and control systems.

Although he is a full-time administrator, he is still interested in computational science. In particular, he wishes he had the time to use the new college parallel processing cluster to work on some unresolved problems in molecular hydrodynamics and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy of proteins and sugars. He is also interested in Extensible Markup Language (XML) applications in the sciences for data storage and portability among computer programs.

He belongs to the ACM, IEEE, and IEEE-Computer Society, and served the profession as an ABET-CAC accreditation evaluator (and hopes to continue doing so).