David Foster studied Physics at Imperial College, London. He graduated with first class honours and undertook postgraduate research in Applied Optics under the supervision of W. D. Wright and K. H. Ruddock. A year after receiving his PhD, he was appointed to a tenured lectureship in the Department of Physics at Imperial, where he stayed for a further six years. He then moved to Keele University, Staffordshire, where he was later appointed to a personal chair and then to the Headship. He later held similar appointments at Aston University, Birmingham, and UMIST, Manchester. He took up his present position in the School of Electrical & Electronic Engineering, University of Manchester, in 2006.
He was elected Fellow of the Institute of Physics and of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications in 1981, and awarded a DSc in Biophysics from London University in 1982. He was elected Fellow of the Optical Society of America in 2004. He has served on the management committees of the Colour Group of Great Britain and of the Applied Vision Association.
He co-founded the journal Spatial Vision in 1983, served as Editor-in-Chief for Europe and Australasia, and is now Associate Editor. He is also Associate Editor of Computers in Biology and Medicine and a senior member of the Editorial Board of Vision Research with special responsibility for colour vision.
He has published over 170 research papers on vision, colour vision, and mathematical modelling. The title of his Stiles Memorial Lecture in 2004 was Colour Vision in Natural Scenes and of his Palmer Lecture in 2007 Spectral Tuning of Human Trichromatic Vision for Object Identification. Recent reference works include Chromatic Function of the Cones, in D. Dartt, J. Besharse, & R. Dana (Eds.), Encyclopedia of the Eye (pp. 266-274) Academic Press, and Color Appearance, in A.I. Basbaum, A. Kaneko, G.M. Shepherd, G. Westheimer, T.D. Albright, & R.H. Masland (Eds.), The Senses: A Comprehensive Reference, Vol. 2, Vision II (pp. 119-132), Academic Press.
