David is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mathematics at The Ohio State University.

He received his PhD in Mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley in 2012. He completed a postdoc at the University of Toronto from 2012-2014, and a postdoc at UCLA from 2014-2016.

He studies subfactors and tensor categories, which lie in the intersection of the mathematical fields of operator algebras, category theory, and quantum algebra. Just as symmetry is encoded by the mathematical notion of a group, subfactors and tensor categories encode quantum symmetry. In turn, they are related to topological phases of matter.