David is from Trinidad, a tropical island in the Caribbean, famous for its steelpans, Carnival and spicy foods. He earned a PhD in Biochemistry (2016) from the Department of Life Sciences at the University of the West Indies. During his PhD he studied the structural and regulatory genes responsible for anthocyanin biosynthesis in anthurium, a tropical ornamental, under the supervision of Pathmanathan Umaharan and Adrian Lennon. Following this, he joined the Cocoa Research Centre in Trinidad as a post-doctoral fellow. Here, his passion in cocoa and chocolates blossomed and he became interested in studying cocoa populations and their genetic diversity and exploiting genes for improving traits. One of his current focus is understanding absorption and sequestration of cadmium into cocoa beans towards mitigation. In 2019, he joined the team at The Future Food Beacon at the University of Nottingham in the laboratories of David Salt and Gabriel Castrillo. He is working on a project that is trying to better understand the microbial communities involved in cocoa bean fermentation and controlling these communities to enhance chocolate flavour.