David was born in Montreal and went to grade school and high school in London, Ontario. He studied chemistry at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky and earned his B.A. in 1993. As a graduate student he worked in the laboratories of David Lynn and Stephen Meredith at the University of Chicago, where he investigated the effects of Zn(II) and amphiphilicity on the ability to modulate structure in alpha- and pi-helical peptides, and the assembly kinetics of beta-amyloid peptides, earning his Ph.D. in 2002. He worked in Michael Rosen's laboratory at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, where he was a Cancer Research Institute Postdoctoral Fellow, and studied the relationships among structure, activity, thermodynamic stability, and internal dynamics in the WASP protein, and how small molecule binding might perturb them.

Between his undergraduate and graduate studies, he worked for two years with Norman C. Schroeder in the Graduate Research Assistant program at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, where he investigated the potential of pillared, layered, inorganic materials to selectively remove 45-Ca and 90-Sr from simulated and actual nuclear waste streams.

In the 2007 - 2008 academic year, he was Visiting Assistant Professor of Chemistry at Swarthmore College, in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania.

David is delighted to be back in Canada.