David Cooper received his Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from Purdue University in 2000 and accepted a post-doctoral position in Zygmunt Derewenda's lab at the University of Virginia. He transitioned to Instructor of Research in 2005 and joined Wladek Minor's lab in 2010. He became an Assistant Professor of Research in 2020. While at the UVA, much of his efforts have been devoted to experimental method development and the generation of tools for other structural biologists. He has been involved with structural genomics since 2005, both as a wet-lab experimenter and a software developer. He is currently part of a team that produces servers to validate families of structures or particular fragments of individual structures. Within the Minor lab, he has been involved with Covid-19 structure validation, CheckMyMetal, the LabDB LIMS, and many smaller projects.