David received his PhD in Neuroscience from the University of Southern California in 2016, where he worked with Dr. Mara Mather to study emotion-cognition interactions. He then conducted a postdoctoral fellowship with Dr. Lila Davachi at NYU and Columbia University, where he studied how episodic memories are constructed from continuous experience. Before attending graduate school, he received a B.S. degree in Biopsychology with a minor in English from the University of California, Santa Barbara.