David Cohen is a geologist and exploration geochemist. He is President of the UNSW Academic Board, President of the Australian Geoscience Council and a Past-President and recipient of the silver medal of the Association of Applied Geochemists, a Fellow of the Australian Institute of Geosciences and the Royal Society of New South Wales. He was head of the School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences from 2009 to 2016. He has 30 years of experience in exploration and environmental geochemistry research in Australia, Europe, Asia, the Middle East and North America. Research area include field methods for exploration and environmental geochemistry, geochemical mapping and multivariate data mining. He lectures in environmental and exploration geochemistry, economic geology and supervises a number of postgraduate research students in geochemistry. He was the 2013 Australasian Institute for Mining and Metallurgy visiting lecturer to New Zealand. He has been involved in various major environmental consultancies, including the contaminant assessment of the Olympic Village Site and regional geochemical mapping for exploration and environmental purposes in NSW and Cyprus. He has been a technical consultant to a number of industrial companies and government departments, including expert opinion services for various legal cases relating to geology and geochemistry.