David A Pearce is the chair of the consortium assembly for the International Rare Diseases Research Consortium (IRDiRC) that represents funding agencies, companies, and patient advocate groups that from approximately 80 countries. He has faculty appointments at the University Of South Dakota School of Medicine, University of Mount Marty and Peking University Medical College Hospital. He completed his undergraduate Bachelor of Science Degree with honors in biological sciences at Wolverhampton Polytechnic in 1986. He gained his PhD in 1990 at the University of Bath, UK, and did postdoctoral training at the University of Rochester, U.S., and Oxford University, UK.
Dr. Pearce is an internationally recognized leader in a number of areas. He has published over 120 research papers on Batten disease. He founded an international registry for rare diseases known as the Coordination of Rare Diseases at Sanford (CoRDS). He has served on numerous NIH review committees, rare disease advisory boards and has organized rare disease workshops for the National Institute for Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) arm of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). He has presented at numerous international meetings on rare disease, precision medicine, regenerative medicine and use of electronic medical records for biomedical research.
He has overseen the development of numerous research and education programs as well as development and regulation of numerous clinical trials.
