David graduated from Mount Saint Mary's College and received his Ph.D. degree in physiology from East Carolina University for graduate work with Edward Seidel, on the regulation of polyamine compounds and their metabolism during cell growth and proliferation.

Moving to Boston, David completed his postdoctoral research, first, with John Wagner at the Dana–Farber Cancer Institute at Harvard Medical School, and then with Michael Greenberg at Harvard Medical School, where he made several seminal contributions to signal transduction and growth factor signaling in neurons.

[1] In 1995, David was invited by Solomon Snyder to move to Baltimore, Maryland, to become a new faculty member of the Department of Neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

In the fall of 2013, David and his laboratory moved from Maryland to Boston, MA, where he became the Edward R. and Anne G. Lefler Professor of Neurobiology in the Department of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School, while maintaining his status of an HHMI investigator.

[citation needed] After becoming established, he received a Jacob Javitz Neuroscience Investigator's Award from the National Institutes of Health.