David A. Rockcliffe is a permanent Program Director in the Division of Chemistry in the Directorate for Biological Sciences at the National Science Foundation. He joined NSF in 2007 as a program director in the Division of Molecular and Cellular Biosciences (MCB) in the Molecular Biophysics cluster. In 2013 he transferred to the Chemistry of Life Processes program in the Division of Chemistry and returned to MCB in 2017 as the cluster leader for the Systems and Synthetic Biology cluster in MCB. Prior to joining NSF he was a faculty member in the Division of Mathematics and Sciences at Kentucky State University where his research was focused on investigating peptide mimics of the active sites of metalloproteins in order to understand structure-function relationships in the metal binding domain. He received his Ph.D. degree in chemistry at Loyola University of Chicago and undertook post-doctoral studies at Texas A&M University.