David is interested in geography of remote, peripheral and rural areas. While he has a strongly quantitative approach on analysing spatial processes and relations, his aspiration is to assess empirical results and data limitations in a social and cultural context. His most recent works for example are related to the understanding of the human–geography nexus behind the existence of sparsely populated regions such as the Australian ‘Outback’. He is interested in understanding how existing socio-economic and political frameworks for sparse regions can generate, magnify and reinforce uneven population distributions and determine outcomes for empirical analyses, consequently how these frameworks contribute to the ‘making’ of these sparse regions. Before moving to Australia, David conducted his research in different sub-fields of geography, case study areas and cross-cultural contexts. He was a JSPS post-doctoral fellow in Japan studying the regional demographic impact of nuclear disasters in Japan, Ukraine and Belarus and he is co-editor of the book The Demography of Disasters and the atlas Belarus in Maps. His main research interest at the time was the socio-economic diversity of rural and peripheral areas in post-Soviet countries, but he also studied the impact and speed of urban sprawl in China at the expense of peri-urban areas while he was a visiting fellow at the National Taiwan University.