David is an Assistant Professor of sociology at Columbia University and a faculty fellow with the Institute for Research in African-American Studies. A political sociologist, David studies the consequences of mass imprisonment and how Black communities mobilize in response to it.

In related work, David has studied housing, poverty, and voter participation, as well as the possibilities and constraints of reparations and other redress policies. His research, which uses data ranging from in-depth interviews to large-scale experiments, has appeared or is forthcoming in the American Journal of Sociology, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, among other venues. David earned his PhD from the University of Chicago.