Current Position: Assistant Professor Department of Chemical Engineering West Virginia University

David is currently a tenure-track assistant professor at West Virginia University. He worked for about 5 years in Foster City, CA. at Entelos, a systems biology company that delivers in silico solutions to the life science industry. He will be building on his experience at Entelos building models of diseases to start a biological modeling group at WVU in January. At Northwestern, David worked with Professor Harold Kung for his MS degree and then received his PhD degree under the guidance of Professor Linda Broadbelt. While a graduate student, David participated in an industrial internship at ExxonMobil. Prior to joining Entelos, David was a substitute teacher in the Wilmette School district and a post-doc at Sandia National Laboratory in Livermore, CA. He received a BS degree in chemical engineering from Virginia Tech.

At Entelos, David was involved in developing large-scale mathematical models of human pathophysiology. Together, biosystems engineers and life scientists extract information from the scientific literature to define, calibrate, and validate these large-scale models in Entelos' proprietary modeling platform. At a fundamental level, the work that he did at Entelos is very similar to the work that he did for his PhD. Specifically, he read through the scientific literature to understand physical phenomena, selected an appropriate mathematical framework that represents that phenomena, calibrated the mathematical framework to the available data, and understood the implications of the assumptions inherent in a particular mathematical construct or uncertainty in the available data. The models are used to evaluate new and existing therapeutics for efficacy, simulate potential dosage strategies, and determine potential surrogate markers for identifying patient subpopulations. The major difference between David's work at Entelos and his graduate work is the topic area. His graduate work focused on heterogeneous catalysis related to the petrochemical industry while his work at Entelos focused on immunology, lung physiology, and human metabolism. While he believes he still has much to learn, collaborating with life scientists has provided the guidance for developing expertise in those biological subjects.