David Frank received Bachelors 1996) and Masters 1998) degrees in Geology from the State University of New York in Buffalo where he contributed to projects reconstructing the glacial and climatic history of coastal Alaska using tree rings. After his studies, he worked as a research assistant at the Tree-Ring Lab at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University producing data from tree ring sites collected across the globe. David Frank moved to Switzerland for his doctoral studies at the Swiss Federal Research Institute WSL and the University of Bern 2005) reconstructing climate in central Europe and assessing the impacts of climate change on tree growth. After a post-doctoral appointment, he served as the head of the Palaeoclimatology and Dendroclimatology groups at the WSL 2006–2016) Prior to moving to Tucson, David was also a lecturer at the University of Bern and the ETH in Zurich, served as the advisor to graduate students and post-doctoral scholars, and was a co-organizer for dendrochronological fieldweeks. He is a well-cited author with over 100 peer reviewed publications that contribute to improving knowledge of the coupling between long-term environmental variation tree growth.