David has been an award-winning TV reporter for WCVB in Boston, a founding board member of the Society of Environmental Journalists, a Knight Science Journalism Fellow, a teacher at the Harvard School of Public Health (“The Risk Communication Challenge”) and in the Harvard Extension School’s Program on Environmental Management (“Critical Thinking About Environmental Issues), an international consultant and speaker on risk communication and the psychology of risk perception, a widely-published commentator on health risk issues, and has authored three books on risk and risk perception. He has worked to broaden public awareness of what he has labeled “The Risk Perception Gap”; the harm we suffer when we worry about some things more than the evidence says we need to, or worry about some things less than the evidence warns us we should.

The Risk Perception Gap between our fears and the facts leads to choices that feel right but often cause additional harms. David’s work has tried to highlight those harms by writing and speaking about examples, and describing the underlying risk perception psychology that explains those errors. His most recent book, Curing Cancerphobia, How Risk, Fear, and Worry Mislead Us, explores a particularly profound example; how the deep fear of cancer in some ways now exceeds the risk, leading to choices that cost society billions of dollars and leave tens of thousands of people seriously injured, or dead, not from cancer but from their excessive fear of the disease.