David Cobden is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and is the director of the Thouless Institute for Quantum Matter in Seattle. After doing a PhD at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge he held a postdoctoral fellowship at UC Berkeley, a Marie-Curie Fellowship at the Niels Bohr Institute, and a Lectureship at the University of Warwick before taking up a faculty position in the Department of Physics at the University of Washington. He participates in a variety of experiments on nanoscale condensed matter systems, nowadays mostly involving diverse two-dimensional van der Waals materials like graphene.