David Banks is a member of the Board of Directors of the American Statistical Association, and past-President of the Classification Society. He is a former editor of the Journal of the American Statistical Association; a founding editor of Statistics, Politics and Policy; and a co-editor of the monograph, Statistical Methods for Human Rights. He is a fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, the American Statistical Association, and the Royal Statistical Society. Before joining Duke University, he taught at the University of Cambridge and at Carnegie Mellon University, and he worked in three federal agencies.

Besides extensive publications in the areas of human rights measurement, federal statistics and public policy, David also does research on risk analysis, Bayesian game theory, statistical learning and data mining, computational advertising, epidemiology, and national security. A prominent Bayesian statistician, he has served on six National Academies panels.

David received his doctorate in statistics in 1984 from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech). He then received a National Science Foundation postdoctoral research fellowship in the mathematical sciences, and he spent two years at the University of California, Berkeley.

David joined the HRDAG Advisory Board in February 2013; he served as the chair of the Board until 2018. He first became involved with HRDAG in 1998, when it was housed within the Scientific Freedom and Human Rights Division of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). During the subsequent 17 years, he has provided technical advice on inferential properties of multiple systems estimation and statistical reviews of several of its reports. During his sabbatical in 2010, he worked with the HRDAG office at Benetech.