Whilst Dave recalls that: “as long as I can remember I was interested in Science. Since I was 10, 11, I wanted to be a scientist”, he didn’t actually know what such a career would look like. His father was a kitchen salesman and his mother worked in care homes so it was only when he went to university that he got a real sense of what academia looked like.
There was a moment during my undergraduate when I realised you could do a PhD and that was quite a revelation because I didn’t realise you could do a PhD.
Dave’s passion for research and confidence in his own ability to carry out research developed when he took a year out in industry. He spent this year working on the Human Genome Project at the Sanger Institute and this turned out to be a pivotal year in his life. Even being accepted to the project in the first place was a huge achievement; he recalls the interviewer being so impressed that he had managed to read and understand the paper on the project that this led to him being offered the placement.
Once there, he not only fell in love with research but also met his wife whom he married three years later while they were doing their PhDs at Cambridge. He appreciates being able to share his passion for science with her:
The fact that we are both scientists is really nice. It means we can chat about work and I can tell her about results and tell her about ideas and things like that.
After his PhD, Dave moved from Cambridge to the University of Oxford, taking a postdoctoral post before being awarded a Lectureship at Cranfield University, where he stayed for a couple of years before joining Oxford Brookes about seven years ago. Reflecting on his current role, he says:
I couldn’t have envisaged myself being a lecturer… I used to hate public speaking… but I still get nervous now. Before every lecture I get nervous.
His strategy for coping with nerves is to remind himself that lecturing is really just sharing his love of science.