David Banks obtained a Ph.D. in Statistics in 1984. He won an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in the Mathematical Sciences, which he took at Berkeley, working with David Blackwell. In 1986 he was a visiting assistant lecturer at the University of Cambridge, and then joined the Department of Statistics at Carnegie Mellon in 1987. In 1997 he went to the National Institute of Standards and Technology, then served as Chief Statistician of the U.S. Department of Transportation, and finally joined the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2002. In 2003, he returned to academics at Duke University.

He was the coordinating editor of the Journal of the American Statistical Association. He co-founded the journal Statistics and Public Policy and served as its editor. He co-founded the American Statistical Association's Sections on National Defense and Homeland Security and Text Analysis, and has chaired those sections, as well as the sections on Risk Analysis and Statistical Learning and Data Mining. David Banks is past-president of the Classification Society and the International Society for Business and Industrial Statistics. He has twice served on the Board of Directors of the American Statistical Association. He is a fellow of the American Statistical Association, the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He won the American Statistical Association's Founders Award, the De Groot Award, and gave the William Sealy Gosset and Deming Lectures. From January 2018 to Sept., 2021, he was the director of Statistical and Applied Mathematical Sciences Institute. His research areas include computational advertising, dynamic text networks, adversarial risk analysis (i.e., Bayesian behavioral game theory), human rights statistics, agent-based models, forensics, and certain topics in high-dimensional data analysis.