David Paul Ausubel (October 25, 1918 – July 9, 2008) was an American psychologist. His most significant contribution to the fields of educational psychology, cognitive science, and science education learning was on the development and research on "advance organizers" (see below) since 1960. Biography Family He was born on October 25, 1918, and grew up in Brooklyn, New York. He was nephew of the Jewish historian Nathan Ausubel. Ausubel and his wife Pearl had two children. Education He studied at the University of Pennsylvania where he graduated with honors in 1939, receiving a bachelor's degree majoring in psychology. Ausubel later graduated from medical school in 1943 at Middlesex University where he went on to complete a rotating internship at Gouverneur Hospital, located in the lower east side of Manhattan, New York. Following his military service with the US Public Health Service, Ausubel earned his M.A. and Ph.D. in developmental psychology from Columbia University in 1950. He continued to hold a series of professorships at several schools of education. Psychiatrist In 1973, Ausubel retired from academic life and devoted himself to his psychiatric practice. During his psychiatric practice, Ausubel published many books as well as articles in psychiatric and psychological journals. In 1976, he received the Thorndike Award from the American Psychological Association for "Distinguished Psychological Contributions to Education". Author In 1994, at the age of 75, Ausubel retired from professional life to devote himself full-time to writing. He then published four books: Ego development and Psychopathology (1996), The Acquisition and Retention of Knowledge (2000), Theory and Problems of Adolescent Development (2002), and Death and the Human Condition (2002), In Death and the Human Condition he wrote about the psychology of death and impressed his own personal psychological, theological and philosophical thoughts on the nature and implications of the afterlife, conceptualizing death from the perspective of both Christian believers and non-believers, expressing his view that "the relevance and value of faith should certainly not be derogated or treated pejoratively, as atheists, agnostics, and rationalists tend to do." Death He died on July 9, 2008. Influences Ausubel was influenced by the teachings of Jean Piaget. Similar to Piaget’s ideas of conceptual schemes, Ausubel related this to his explanation of how people acquire knowledge. "David Ausubel theorized that people acquire knowledge primarily by being exposed directly to it rather than through discovery" (Woolfolk et al., 2010, p. 288) In other words, Ausubel believed