For better or for worse, David has always lived within earshot of a train whistle. Born in St. Louis off the MetroLink and quickly translated to New York near the Long Island Rail Road, David went through grade school holding on to the dream of being a scientist by day and rock star by night. As a minor, he had done his time at various lab benches testing drugs on the phlegm of cystic fibrosis patients, watching mice get shot in the testicles by lasers at Harvard, and other pastimes while moving between bands playing music from jazz to punk rock. Boston University was the next stop, living next to the rails of the "T," where his academic career switched tracks from Biology to Biomedical Engineering, then to Mechanical Engineering, and finally Aerospace Engineering where he designed a Personal Air Vehicle with a small team of peers while playing hardcore and electronic music on the side. David remained in the Boston area after graduation to spend a few years at a small Engineering firm working on DoD & NASA contracts. He learned how to use a sewing machine while doing work for an MIT/NASA program developing next-generation space suits and was heavily involved in projects ranging from piezoelectric energy harvesting to electromagnetic railguns with hypersonic projectiles. He had also spent a summer developing spy planes in Southern California. During these years, David toured Boston and NYC playing the musical saw to accompany an Appalachian Folk musician.
Having finally realized that Design is a subject that is indeed taught in schools, David enrolled in Stanford's graduate Design Program to take his experiences in the analytics of Science and the practicum of Engineering and apply them to the products and experiences that enrich our lives. He wants to hear the stories of people's interaction with the world around them and he wants to create new stories with objects and experiences. He wants to use the program's course of study to shorten the distance between what is perceived in the head and what is created by the hand and to learn new ways of telling stories through form, space, interactions, and visual language.
In this final year of graduate study, David is focused on short-distance personal mobility. He is involved with a multi-disciplinary team of Stanford graduate students working on a funded program pursuing innovative concepts in the field of elderly mobility to reduce the likelihood of injury and falls. David brings his expertise of the design-thinking paradigm and human-centric needfinding skills to this team of extremely talented businesspeople, lawyers, engineers, psychologists, and doctors. David is also interested in finding an alternative and universal mode of short-distance transportation that will supersede the automobile for common trips in urban and suburban environments. In general, David is inspired by the "archetypal" object and is working to understand what can make a common object exquisite. This is met with his pursuit of the meaning and execution of branding and how the storytelling of brand can play a wonderfully expressive role in the human evaluation of technology and product creation.