David Schuster is a Professor 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. Currently, he is interested in how complex sociotechnical systems support or hinder people, with a particular focus on decision making among cybersecurity professionals. In 2015, he was awarded a five-year NSF CAREER award to study human cognition in cyber defense. Since that time, he has been awarded supplemental scholarships from NSF to fund undergraduate research training and has mentored over 50 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 CoSS majors. In 2017, he received the Early Career Investigator Award from the SJSU Research Foundation.
Dr. Schuster has co-authored over 30 papers in journals, edited books, and conference proceedings. His work has appeared in Ergonomics and the Journal of Management and Engineering Integration. He has published papers in the Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting. 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. He is a member of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society.
