David Israel Schuster

David Israel Schuster is a chemist who is currently a professor emeritus at New York University. His research program focused on organic photochemistry and later on fullerenes.

Early life and education Schuster was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1935 and raised in Far Rockaway. He attended Columbia University as an undergraduate and received his bachelor's degree in chemistry in 1956. He then moved to the California Institute of Technology, from which he received his Ph.D. in 1961 under the mentorship of John D. Roberts. During Schuster's time in the Roberts laboratory, the group began experimenting with some of the first applications of NMR spectroscopy to organic chemistry. Schuster next joined Howard Zimmerman's group at the University of Wisconsin as a postdoctoral fellow, where he spent a year studying mechanistic organic photochemistry. and synthetic organic chemist Phil Baran, who worked in the laboratory as an NYU undergraduate. Schuster closed his laboratory and retired, assuming professor emeritus status, in 2010.

Personal life Schuster married his wife Carlotta, a psychiatrist, in 1962. He is a lifelong classical music enthusiast and serious pianist.