About David

I am a scholar–practitioner working at the intersection of movement-based learning, ecological approaches to perception, cross-cultural practice, self-protection, and qualitative research. Across both academic study and long-term embodied training, I have pursued a continuous question: how do humans learn, adapt, and transform through sustained engagement with dynamic environments?

My background includes long-term endurance sport as a triathlete, graduate study in exercise physiology, and over a decade of disciplined practice in Japanese martial arts. These experiences did not simply precede my academic work; they shaped its direction. Over time, my focus shifted from performance outcomes in sports competition to the deeper processes by which sustained practice reorganizes perception, attention, judgment, and self-regulation—particularly when practices move across cultural contexts and must be interpreted, translated, and reconfigured.

I am currently a practitioner and collaborative research partner at Shinobi Martial Arts, where continued study of ninjutsu (Japanese martial systems of self-protection) serves as a living site of inquiry into movement-based learning, ecological attunement, and the cross-cultural transmission of embodied disciplines. This sustained engagement informs both my conceptual work and my qualitative research, grounding theoretical claims in lived practice.

My doctoral research in East–West Psychology examined ninpo taijutsu (the body movements and techniques of ninjutsu) as a technology of the self: a structured, disciplined practice through which I cultivate perceptual refinement, adaptive expertise, and intentional self-transformation (see my dissertation defense). My research looked specifically at the concept of becoming imperceptible—a subtle skill of blending into one’s environment, both physically and relationally. Drawing on ecological approaches to learning, phenomenology, cross-cultural analysis, and practice-as-research frameworks, I treat embodied practice not as the application of theory, but as a site where knowledge is generated, tested, and transmitted.

My background includes being a cancer survivor, attending the U.S. Naval Academy, serving as an officer on a nuclear submarine, and working in systems integration, competitive intelligence, and financial analysis. In addition to a PhD in East-West Psychology, I have a BS in computer science, an MS in Exercise Physiology, and an MSE in Engineering Management.

Today, I teach, collaborate, and write at the boundary between scholarship and lived inquiry, working with universities, researchers, and doctoral students who are engaging questions that require both conceptual rigor and sustained practice.