David Travers
David John Travers is a businessman from Sydney, Australia.
Education
Travers attended Cleve Area School and then Flinders University and Harvard University. His family arrived in Australia from Kilkenny, Ireland and Normandy, France in 1848. After five generations of farming, Travers' father encouraged him to leave the farm and obtain a tertiary education.Career
Travers began his career as a cadet journalist at Fairfax Media in 1988. He left in 1998, to become Chief of Staff to the South Australian Liberal Deputy Premier Hon Graham Ingerson. After Ingerson resigned for misleading Parliament, Travers won a job in the State's public service. When Labor Party leader Mike Rann became Premier, following the 2002 State Election, he tasked Travers with establishing Carnegie Mellon University, Australia. Travers moved to London in 2006 as Deputy Agent-General for South Australia working under Agents General Maurice de Rohan OBE and then Bill Muirhead.After meeting University College London Provost Malcolm Grant in early 2007, he convinced UCL to join CMU in establishing an overseas campus in Adelaide. In 2010, Sir Malcolm appointed Travers as both CEO of its new UCL Australia and a governor of its UCL's Qatar board in Doha. He quit UCL in early 2015 after the new Provost Michael Arthur (physician) unexpectedly announced plans to close the international campus program.
He is currently the chairman of Scope Global. He was the founding chairman of Sundrop Farms, which brought private equity firm KKR into Australian horticulture in 2014.
Travers is a pioneer in the sector of agricultural technology, combining technology and skills from the defence sector, fourth-generation distributed ledger technology, and IoT to provide a system of geolocated, time-stamped and immutable records that allows manufacturers and consumers to verify the authenticity of wine before making a purchase.