David left a career in petroleum refining in 1986 to do an MSc followed by a PhD in molecular biology. He worked initially on cancer biology and cell signalling but has since switched to Drosophila genetics. He is currently a postdoc with the Ashburner group doing both bench work and bioinformatics. David initially learnt BioJava when he had to move large numbers of annotations he accumulated on certain regions of the Drosophila genome when the coordinate framework of the Drosophila genome was changed in a new release. That task remains most cussedly undone but he has moved on to using BioJava routinely in other activities. His most lasting contributions to BioJava tend to be bugfixes but his most recent contribution was a SymbolList regex package. On the other hand, some of his earlier contributions will most deservedly be taken out back and shot.

His current BioJava activity centres around HMM models for comparative genomics and novel software approaches for analysis of chromatin immunoprecipitation microarray results. Most of this software will eventually end up in BioJava somewhere.