David Bird was born in the “Riverland” wine-producing district of Australia in 1958. He attended the University of Adelaide, and in 1984 received a Ph.D. in Biochemistry. He then spent three years researching C. elegans developmental genetics with Don Riddle in Columbia, Missouri. Following that training, David joined the faculty of the University of California-Riverside, and in 1995 moved to NC State University to join the faculty in Plant Pathology. Dr. Bird sits on numerous university and professional panels and committees, including having served as Chair of the University Research Committee, as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Nematology, and as a member of the Science Advisory Board of Divergence Inc. He currently serves as Director of the NCSU Bioinformatics Research Center and as Director of the university’s Genomic Sciences Graduate Program. In 1996, Bird was named the Stoll-Stunkard Memorial Lecturer by the American Society of Parasitologists, and in 2012, Dr. Bird was named William Neal Reynolds Distinguished Professor.

Dr. Bird’s research interests include: nematode biology and development; genome organization and evolution; structure-function relationships; host-parasite interactions; evolution of parasitism; host responses and resistance/susceptibility to pathogens; plant development. The primary focus of his research group is to understand the mechanisms underlying parasitic interactions between nematodes and plants. David was a pioneer in framing the key questions in the context of nematode and host development. Together with collaborators world-wide, his group has been instrumental in establishing the root-knot nematode, Meloidogyne hapla, as the preeminent genetic system to model less-tractable nematode-host interactions, and as a platform for comparative genomics (www.hapla.org). His current program also emphasizes vaccine development for malaria-like diseases of cats and dogs.