David's primary role as an educator is to ensure that learners have the knowledge, skills, and motivation they need to serve as future change agents and leaders. To that end, he considers learners to be his students-as-partners during their educational journeys together. He strives to create inclusive and learner-centric opportunities that support transformative learning opportunities. For his Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) efforts, he is interested in understanding affective responses students display within technology-enhanced STEM classrooms. By way of qualitative and quantitative research, he wants to know how value, emotion, and attribution intersect to affect learning outcomes. In his classes, he regularly measures the impact learning design has on student uses of self-regulated learning behaviors and metacognition. He is a Senior Leadership Fellow with the National Center for Science and Civic Engagement's SENCER initiative.

As an aquatic ecologist, David has primarily worked in the estuarine areas of the Florida Everglades, where he measures energy flow through foodwebs using stable isotope analyses. Research specialties include:

• Estuarine ecology
• Foodweb ecology
• Stable isotope ecology
• Everglades restoration