About Dr. David

Like a lot of data protection professionals, my pathway to privacy has been unconventional. After completing my Bachelor of Arts in English at the University of Florida, I moved overseas and taught English as a Foreign Language in K-12 and post-secondary classrooms, spending time in Prague, Czech Republic (2005-6), and Harbin, People’s Republic of China (2006-14). In addition to teaching English in the PRC, I owned and operated a teacher certification institute that credentialed more than 200 teachers. I also completed my first Master of Arts degree at Heilongjiang University, where I specialized in ancient Chinese history.

After almost a decade overseas, I returned to the U.S. to complete my doctorate degree in modern Chinese history at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). While completing the degree, I taught undergraduate courses in Modern China, Modern East Asia, and World History, altogether teaching for five different universities and community colleges across southern California.

As I was entering the final year of my doctorate program, the COVID-19 pandemic upended my plans to enter academia as a full-time professor. As the single source of income for a family of four, nation-wide hiring freezes across higher education required that I look outside of the professoriate for gainful employment. Luckily, I was awarded a Presidential Management Fellowship that afforded me the opportunity to enter the public sector as a privacy analyst.

Since 2021, I have been responsible for a wide-ranging portfolio of data protection and privacy risk and compliance activities. This includes policymaking, conducting privacy impact and privacy control assessments, creating and tracking key performance and risk indicators, and workforce development. Concerning the latter, I’m responsible for developing and delivering privacy workforce training—which includes an “AI Literacy for Privacy Professionals” course—to an organization with over 100,000 employees.

While my period of formal schooling ended in 2021, as a privacy professional I’ve continued to satiate my life-long hunger for learning. I’m a graduate of Carnegie Mellon University’s Privacy Engineering Certificate Program. I’ve also earned the IAPP’s Certified Information Privacy Professional / United States (CIPP/US), Certified Information Privacy Manager (CIPM), and Artificial Intelligence Governance Professional (AIGP) certifications. In 2024, I was honored to receive the IAPP’s Fellow of Information Privacy (FIP) designation.

Because I believe that data protection and privacy are best approached in an interdisciplinary manner, I’ve made it a point to learn adjacent disciplines, including cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, and data science. In 2023, I successfully passed the (ISC)2 Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) examination, earning the Associate of (ISC)2 designation. Other certifications include the GIAC Critical Controls Certification and Codecademy’s Data Science Foundations Skill Path.