David joins Northwestern following a long career with SPSS Inc. and IBM, primarily leading statistical support for SPSS software. He has worked with researchers on thousands of statistical issues in a wide variety of fields and has authored hundreds of technical notes and brief articles on statistical topics for users of SPSS and related software and numerous posts on listservs and network newsgroups. He has also written several dozen statistical macros and Python-based extension commands for SPSS. He also served for almost five years as Lead Statistician for the product, leading statistical development of new procedures and enhancements to existing ones, including integration of several Python Scikit-learn libraries as extension commands. He also served for three years as Lead Statistician/Data Scientist for IBM Watson Machine Learning Visualization. His team’s contributions to SPSS and Watson development led to two IBM Outstanding Technical Achievement Awards and co-authorship of a U. S. patent for a method of data compression for scatterplot data.
David’s academic/scholarly background includes teaching assistantships in statistical courses as a graduate student and as a volunteer teaching assistant in psychological statistics and political psychology courses as an undergraduate. He has authored or co-authored over a dozen papers in academic/professional journals in social sciences and medicine, and delivered presentations at various professional conferences, including the Joint Statistical Meetings, where he has presented both technical session papers and computer technology workshops. He also has extensive experience as a formal statistical consultant.
David has a PhD in Research Methodology and Quantitative Psychology and an AM in Philosophy, focusing on philosophy of science, both from the University of Chicago, and a BA in Psychology from Michigan State University. Outside of work he has long been active in human rights work, enjoys family trips to national parks and other scenic locations, and is a three-time finisher of the Chicago Marathon.