Official Story
David earned a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering with a focus on control systems and prosthetics. During his undergraduate years, he spent two summers as an intern at a medical device company, where he holds a patent for the software and hardware he developed for building intelligent pacemakers. David then earned a master's degree in biomedical engineering, where he used electrophysiology, behavior, and computational modeling to study how barn owls hunt their prey. After finishing his M.S., David spent 11 months as a research assistant at Columbia University. During that short time he performed experiments leading to 3 manuscripts on primate behavior, vision and attention. The following year David continued at Columbia as a graduate student, rotating through three labs, one of which resulted in a first author paper. David joined the lab of Sarah Woolley as its first graduate student, where he published 8 more papers (3 first author) and received multiple fellowships and awards, including an NRSA. David moved to Duke University for a postdoc in 2012 and published his first 2 papers within 24 months. As a postdoc he was the recipient of a Helen Hay Whitney Foundation postdoctoral fellowship and an Allison Doupe Fellowship from the McKnight Foundation. David does not have a K99/R00, but only because he declined it (after receiving a perfect score of 10) to accept a Career Award from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund. David started his lab at NYU in January of 2018 and was recently named a Searle Scholar.
Unofficial Story
David grew up in rural North Dakota. He was a mediocre student in high school and applied to exactly one college, North Dakota State University, where it took him 5 years to earn a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering. It took 5 years because he nearly flunked out in years 2 and 3 and rarely attended class except in years 1 and 5. Despite bad grades and a broken compass, he applied to 4 masters programs and got into 1, for the sole reason that the chair at that department was a former professor at NDSU. When he finished his MS, he applied to 11 PhD programs and was rejected by all of them. The next obvious step (to him) was to cold-call the director of graduate studies at Columbia (where he had just been rejected) and ask if there were any labs that would hire him for a year. There was, so he moved to New York. David worked at Columbia for a year, reapplied to grad school and was accepted everywhere he applied this time. Since starting his PhD, David has naively interacted with PIs as if they were peers. This includes the time he bumped into Richard Axel at a bodega the summer before grad school and told him he was going to join his lab for his first rotation. He did indeed rotate in the Axel lab, and was paired up with a sociopathic postdoc who provoked David's first anxiety attacks and just about made him drop out of grad school. But David recovered, ended up studying bird brains with Sarah Woolley, then moved to Duke for a postdoc before coming back to NYC in 2018. David's path eventually worked because he married someone much smarter than him and because rather than work 80 hour weeks, he spends most of his evenings and weekends hanging out with his children.