Student Profiles

David is a DMD-DPhil student pursuing his dental degree at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) School of Dentistry and DPhil at the University of Oxford.  He joined UAB’s Early Dental School Acceptance Program (EDSAP) as a first-year undergraduate student in 2011 and graduated Summa Cum Laude from UAB’s EDSAP, University Honors, and Biomedical Engineering Programs with a B.S. in Biomedical Engineering in 2015.  Throughout his undergraduate and professional education, he trained in the Biomedical Engineering lab of Dr. Ho-Wook Jun developing novel bionanomatrix materials and partook in multiple clinical research trials.  With exposure to prominent clinical research teams caring for individuals with craniofacial diseases and disorders, three years of dental education further solidified his aim for an academic career investigating molecular mechanisms of craniofacial embryogenesis and development.

Intent on characterizing mechanisms driving these processes from a basic biology perspective, in 2018 he joined the lab of Dr. Kenneth Yamada in the NIDCR as an NIH Medical Research Scholars Program fellow.  In the Yamada lab, he analyzed basic cell signaling mechanisms and sought means of continuing to learn from some of the most notable scientists of the era.  These efforts brought him to his current position in the NIH-OxCam program as a student of Dr. Kenneth Yamada and Professor Alex Bullock investigating the functional and structural characteristics of proteins implicated in development and disease.  Upon completing the NIH-OxCam program, David will build on this basic science foundation through continued research and clinical training.  His goal is an academic career leading a team of clinicians and scientists who design and develop novel biomaterials that can regulate cell-cell and cell-extracellular matrix interactions in clinical therapeutic applications.