David pursued his chemistry studies at the National University of Singapore with 1^st class honours and moved to Germany for his Ph.D. jointly offered by the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research (MPIP) and Ulm University under the supervision of Prof. Tanja Weil. He graduated with summa cum laude in 2014 and started as a junior group leader at Ulm University. He subsequently joined the MPIP in 2016 and founded the synthetic life-like systems group to bring supramolecular concepts that modify and create new cellular functions at the systems level. Since 2021, David co-established the BioCore Facility as an integral unit of the MPIP to study complex dynamic behaviour at the material-cell interface. He was featured in journals of the German Chemical Society & the Royal Society of Chemistry as an emerging key figure for material science at the chemistry-biology interface.