Hi, I am David. Who am I?

When meeting someone, “Where are you from?” is the question that growing up as a Third Culture Kid I dreaded, as the simple concise answer most people expected quickly detoured down a rabbit-hole.

My family, originally from southwest Michigan, moved to Chiapas, Mexico for work when I was two. I learned to read and write in Spanish long before I did in English; my childhood memories include birding around the local Mayan ruins on the weekends; and the only time I have ever been to Cancun was after enduring a 22 hour bus ride through the mountains so that I could take my SAT exam for the US university admissions process, as it was the closest testing site.

I moved back to the US for university when I was 17. I graduated from Northwest College, receiving my A.S in Natural Resources Biology. It was during my time in Powell, Wyoming that thanks to undergraduate research opportunities through INBRE that I first became interested in Microbiology. After Northwest, I transferred to the University of Wyoming where I received a B.S. in Molecular Biology and Microbiology, and got my first taste of immunology researching Natural Killer cell responses in mice to secondary Toxoplasma gondii infection in the lab of Dr.Jason Gigley.

After university, I served in the Peace Corps as a Secondary Science Teacher in Ghana from 2016-2018. I taught biology and chemistry at a rural high school in the Volta Region. During my time in Ghana, I worked on secondary projects focused on Malaria that led to my decision to enter a Microbiology and Immunology PhD program.

I moved to Baltimore for my PhD in 2018. After a year and a half of classes and passing my qualifying exam, I was excited to finally start full time in the lab. Since that was March 2020, that was not going to happen. While stuck at home, I volunteered for the Pfizer Phase I clinical trial taking place at the University of Maryland Center for Vaccine Development and somehow ended up having family and friends telling me they saw my arm in the newspaper for the next nine months.