Dr. David Anderson is the Leonardo Reader in Aerospace Systems at the University of Glasgow. His research centres on engineering simulation, control and AI/ML, with particular application to aerospace and remote-sensing systems.

He is the director of Glasgow's Micro Autonomous Systems Technologies (MAST) Laboratory, a combined rapid prototyping and testing facility for Uncrewed Aerial Systems (UAS). The MAST Laboratory supports his research into design optimisation of UAS for operational requirements. He is also the architect and principal developer of MAVERIC, an engineering grade synthetic environment that supports a variety of operational and behavioural analyses of autonomous vehicles.

He has a strong industrial background, having worked as a senior systems engineer for a large defence firm (Leonardo UK) and principal technical consultant servicing the aerospace, defence and automotive sectors. He has consulted for and provided training to many companies & governmental organisations including DSTL, Leonardo Air & Space, Thales Optronics, Boeing Commercial aircraft, SELEX, BAE SYSTEMS, DSTO and the US Army. He is currently sponsored by Leonardo Radar & Advanced Tracking Systems to further develop MAVERIC as a synthetic data generation tool for AI/ML, with particular specialisation on trusted reinforcement learning for safety-critical systems.