David has an undergraduate degree and a PhD from the University of Cambridge. He was a Fulbright-Hayes Scholar and Research Associate at the University of Chicago, and a Research Fellow at Clare College Cambridge, before moving to UCL in 1983 as a Royal Society University Research Fellow. At UCL, he was appointed Professor at the age of 33, and later served as Head of the Department Earth Sciences, and as Dean of Mathematical and Physical Sciences, before being appointed to his current position of Vice Provost in 2007.
He was one of the first to establish the now major interdisciplinary field of computational mineral physics. He has published over 250 research papers/chapters, and his work has attracted over 11,400 citations (as reported in Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=-BkrFg8AAAAJ&hl=en ).
He was awarded the Schlumberger Medal of the Mineralogical Society of Great Britain in 1999; the Murchison Medal of the Geological Society of London in 2002; and in 2006 he was awarded the Louis Néel Medal of the European Geosciences Union for “establishing the importance of computational mineral physics in Earth sciences and for outstanding contributions to the physics of the Earth's core". He is a Member of the Academia Europaea, Fellow of the Geological Society of London, and an Elected Fellow of the American Geophysical Union and of the Mineralogical Society of America.
He was President of the Mineralogical Society of Great Britain and Ireland (2004-6) and has been a Vice-President of the European Mineralogical Union. He has been an editor of Elsevier’s “Earth and Planetary Science Letters” (2005-8). He was a member of the UK’s HEFCE RAE2008 sub-panel on Earth and Environmental Sciences, chaired the HEFCE REF2014 sub-Panel in this area (2011-14), and was formerly a non-executive Director the North Middlesex University Hospital NHS Trust (2011-15). He is Chair of Governors of the UCL Academy School; a Council Member of the UK’s STFC; Chair of the Vice-Rectors of Research Committee of the Leagues of European Research Universities; and is a Chair of the HEFCE Responsible Metrics Forum.
