Professor DeSantis was born and raised in a town made famous by the game Monopoly. Reading, Pennsylvania, the home of the Reading Railroad, is where the road to political science began for him. In many ways, Professor DeSantis was raised to be involved from politics from an early age, when he would routinely watch congressional debates on C-SPAN with his late grandfather for hours at a time during summer vacation. After attending Muhlenberg High School, he was encouraged by his parents to see “the other side of the mountain” by attending a college in a different region of the country. He packed his bags and headed to the South.

Professor DeSantis earned his BA in Political Science from Furman University, which is located in Greenville, South Carolina. His undergraduate studies focused on Chinese politics and US history. As an undergraduate, he interned in Washington, DC at the Center for Education Reform, which is an advocacy group that promotes alternative forms of education. His MA degree in Political Science is from the University of Florida, where he is in the final stages of completing his PhD. Prior to joining High Point's faculty, he taught at the University of Florida, Furman, and the University of Texas at El Paso.

Professor DeSantis specializes in the study of evangelical politics in the United States, a topic on which he has published extensively. He has done work on several other aspects of American politics, including social movements, voting behavior, political parties and interest groups, campaigns and elections, political institutions, and American political development. In recent years, he has attended and presented his research at over a dozen academic conferences, including at the annual meetings of the American Political Science Association, the State Politics and Policy Conference, the Midwestern Political Science Association, the Southern Political Science Association, the Western Political Science Association, and the Southwestern Political Science Association.

Outside of the classroom, Professor DeSantis is an avid sports fan of all Philadelphia sports teams as well as the Furman University and University of Florida athletic programs. He takes pleasure in encouraging his students to learn the fight song of the Philadelphia Eagles, the number of years the city of Philadelphia has gone without a championship in any sport, the dynamic of the Furman-Georgia Southern rivalry, and why Florida is a superior athletic school to Florida State and Miami.