David is a researcher, writer and public speaker with an innate ability to see things differently. His work helps organizations, systems, and professionals rethink the logics that dominate their fields and reflect honestly on the unintended harms those logics create. For experts by experience, he helps make sense of why those same logics so often silence, sanitize, and silo their voice and participation. What David offers isn't a call to fight the system, nor an invitation to comply with it, but a different way forward entirely, one where a different future can quietly take shape, and then spread.

As Associate Professor in Criminology at the University of Derby, David's research on addiction recovery, desistance, and the authority of lived experience is grounded in work that began at the Cambridge Institute of Criminology and has since taken him to the United Nations, the British Library, and UK Parliament, where his evidence has been formally accepted. Through New Central Media, the publishing imprint he founded, that thinking becomes practice: lived-experience authors become published voices, speakers and contributors to wider conversations about justice, recovery and society.