David Schuster is a Professor in the Department of Psychology at San José State University and Principal Investigator at the Virtual Environments, Cognition, and Training Research (VECTR) Lab since 2013. He earned a Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Central Florida, specializing in Applied Experimental and Human Factors Psychology.
Dr. Schuster’s research centers on understanding individual and shared cognition in complex environments. He has conducted research in domains such as aviation, transportation security training, and military human-robot interaction. He is interested in how complex sociotechnical systems support or hinder people, with a focus on decision making among cybersecurity professionals. In 2015, he was awarded an NSF CAREER award to study human cognition in cyber defense. He was awarded supplemental scholarships from NSF to fund undergraduate research training and has mentored over 70 students in his lab. He was a co-investigator of an NSF-funded technology pathway program, which led to a minor in computer programming for social science majors. As lead developer of APEX Statistics, funded by the Center for Advancing Women in Technology, Dr. Schuster developed open educational resources that leverage Python to teach statistics. In 2017, he received the Early Career Investigator Award from the SJSU Research Foundation.
He is faculty in the MA Program in Research and Experimental Psychology and the MS Program in Human Factors/Ergonomics. Dr. Schuster has taught graduate and undergraduate courses in research methods and statistics, as well as undergraduate human factors and general psychology.
Dr. Schuster's work has appeared in Ergonomics, Human Factors, and Information and Computer Security. Dr. Schuster has presented at the IEEE Conference on Cognitive Methods in Situation Awareness and Decision Support and the NATO Information Systems and Technology Panel Symposium on Emerged and Emerging Disruptive Technologies.
