David graduated from the University of Limerick with a B.A. in Law and Accounting. Following this, he moved to UCD where he switched to Computer Science. There he earned a H.Dip., M.Sc. and Ph.D. prior to joining the academic staff. He has published peer-reviewed research papers in a variety of subject areas, including digital forensics, information retrieval, agent oriented software engineering, component-based systems, and wireless sensor networks. He is affiliated to the Beijing-Dublin International College: a joint undertaking with Beijing University of Technology (BJUT). He is an SFI funded investigator on the Crop Optimisation through Sensing, Understanding and Visualisation (CONSUS) project, and is a collaborator in the CeADAR centre for applied data analytics.