Eli Donkar is a mathematician by training (having earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from Princeton University in 1973), an actuary by profession (he retired in 2018 after serving 41 years in the Social Security Administration’s Office of the Chief Actuary—the last 25 of those years as Deputy Chief Actuary), and a lifelong amateur musician. He has applied his love of music in the instrumental arena by studying and performing on the clarinet for over 60 years. Most recently, he has served as the principal clarinetist in the Baltimore Philharmonia Orchestra since its inception in the fall of 1998. He still recalls fondly the BPO’s very first concert in December 1998 in which we performed Verdi’s overture to La Forza del Destino and Schubert’s Symphony No. 8 (the “Unfinished”). Over that same period, he has studied clarinet performance regularly with David Drosinos, and attributes most of his growth as a clarinetist to David's amazing abilities as a teacher.