In May 2016, David graduated with an interdisciplinary Ph.D. from UT Austin. He has ample experience in language documentation having worked at sites in Nepal, Mongolia, and Germany. David joined the Texas German Dialect Project to expand his understanding of language change in the context of immigration. His dissertation dealt with the opposite development of language death: with help of descriptive and experimental methods he explores social networks as well as morpho-syntactic and semantic change in immigrant neighborhoods in Germany in order to better identify speakers of newly emerging varieties of German. David is currently employed as a junior researcher at the Institute for the German Language in Mannheim, Germany.
