About

David is an experimental soft matter physicist with interdisciplinary training in granular physics, glasses and jamming, microfluidics, fluid dynamics, nonlinear dynamics and geophysics. His research seeks to understand the fundamental mechanisms that govern complicated natural phenomena such as erosion, landslides, and groundwater pollutant transport towards the end goal of prediction and manipulation of these events.

David received his Ph.D. in Physics from Emory University. During his doctoral training with Dr. Eric Weeks, he explored the packing of highly polydisperse circles and revealed that the statistics of the circle sizes can accurately predict their packing. He also developed microfluidic techniques to study droplet motion in porous media, and characterized their breakup, coalescence and spread in these media. Currently at UMD, he works with Dr. Alban Sauret working on something geophysics-y. He'll fill this section in as the work begins.

David is not only a scientist. He is a loving husband who was married in 2026. He spends time with community organizing, politics, and science outreach and communication. He is also an avid PC gamer, enjoying a wide breadth of genres such as grand strategy games, turn based strategy such as competitive Pokémon, and hero shooters. He enjoys consuming edutainment videos on youtube, that touch on extremely useless, but nonetheless interesting topics.

David has received awards such as the Jim and Ethel Montag Graduate Physics Award for 2025, Gallery of Soft Matter 2025 People's Choice Award, and The Holt and Riley Prize in Physics 2021.