At the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), he graduated in geophysics and space physics with an M.S.
His Ph.D. thesis A Numerical Investigation of Thermal Convection in Highly Viscous Spherical Shells with Applications to Mantle Dynamics in the Earth and Other Terrestrial Planets was supervised by Gerald Schubert.
[2] The thesis, which adapted a numerical code introduced by Gary Glatzmaier, was immediately recognized as a breakthrough in realistic modeling of convection in the Earth's mantle.
Bercovici has an international reputation for his expertise in geological fluid dynamics and research on the geodynamics of Earth's mantle and lithosphere.
[11][12] David Bercovici, Christoph F. Hieronymus, and other colleagues have also developed models explaining why hotspot volcanoes form discrete and sometimes parallel island chains[13][14][1] and explaining why volcanoes oscillate prior to eruptions.
[15][1] As a member of a 19-member team in support of a NASA space mission, Bercovici investigated approaches to imaging and modeling the topography and geomorphology of the asteroid named 16 Psyche.