David H Auston earned Bachelors and Masters degrees from the University of Toronto, Canada. He then earned his Ph.D. from the University of California Berkeley, USA. He has held positions at a variety of institutions in the US, including AT&T’s Bell Laboratories, Columbia University, Case Western University and the Kavli Foundation. Today, he is a researcher at the Institute for Energy Efficiency and Director of the TomKat UC Carbon Neutrality Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara. There, he also holds adjunct professorships in the Electrical & Computer Engineering and Materials departments.

He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering. Auston is a Fellow of OSA, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, IEEE, and APS. In 1985, he received OSA’s R. W. Wood Prize “for pioneering work in the field of picosecond optical electronics, and for the invention and demonstration of the picosecond optoelectronic photoconductive switch.”