David is a Principal People Scientist at Kestrel HR Analytics, where he leads research on engagement-to-attrition prediction. His current work focuses on which engagement survey questions actually predict 90-day exit risk at the team level — and which ones, despite being widely used, do not.
Before joining Kestrel in 2022, David spent five years at a large consultancy where he built engagement survey instruments for Fortune 500 HR functions. He left because he wanted to work at the granularity where intervention actually happens, which is rarely the granularity at which large consultancies operate.
David holds a PhD in Organizational Psychology from the University of Michigan. His doctoral work examined the relationship between manager quality and team-level exit dynamics; that work informs the manager-change feature that appears in most current Kestrel attrition models.