David is a lecturer at the  University of Exeter, based at the Penryn Campus in Cornwall, UK.

David is a climate scientist specialising in understanding past ocean dynamics and their impacts on ecosystems and the wider climate system. He builds high-resolution records of past ocean and climate variability by analyzing annual growth patterns in long-lived marine organisms. These sclerochronologies form part of a broader effort to develop multi-proxy climate reconstructions, which also include tree rings, ice cores, and sediment records. By integrating these diverse archives, he generates precisely dated time series that reveal how Earth’s climate and ocean systems have changed over recent centuries.

His work focuses on applying these records to test and validate climate models. Because they extend beyond the instrumental era and capture interannual to multidecadal variability, these datasets are crucial for assessing how well models simulate past conditions. This, in turn, helps to improve projections of future climate change.

Ultimately,  Daivd uses these reconstructions to better understand the drivers and impacts of climate variability—information that is key to evaluating climate risk and guiding adaptation strategies in both marine and terrestrial environments.

In addition, David develops open-source software tools to support the scientific community in generating and interpreting high-resolution proxy records. One example is the RingdateR app, a graphical and statistical tool designed to assist with crossdating annually resolved growth increment data from marine, freshwater, and terrestrial archives. These tools aim to make complex analytical workflows more accessible, reproducible, and transparent.