David is a 2nd-year Ph.D. Student in the Division of Nutritional Sciences. He completed his A.S. in Chemistry at Wilbur Wright College, B.S. in Chemistry, Biology with a minor in Physics at Northeastern Illinois University, and M.S. in Food Science and Human Nutrition at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. As an Undergraduate student, he was a McNair Scholar and worked in a Pathogenic Microbiology laboratory where he experimented with different treatments for multidrug resistance in Pseudomonas aeruginosa. As a Master’s student, his experiments involved the in vitro digestion of a commercial probiotic yogurt matrix with added food components and controls to test for probiotic (bifidobacterial strain) survivability. Currently, he is a lead on the ongoing SCOPE clinical trial (NCT05066425) and is working towards his preliminary exam.