Dave Deamer was born in Santa Monica California in 1939. His family moved to Ohio in 1950, where he attended Westerville High School. Deamer completed undergraduate studies in chemistry at Duke University in 1961, and a Ph.D. at the Ohio State University School of Medicine. After post-doctoral research at UC Berkeley, Deamer became a faculty member at UC Davis in 1967, then moved to UC Santa Cruz in 1994. He has been a visiting professor at Bristol University, Australian National University as a Guggenheim Fellow, and the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, Israel. Deamer's primary research interests include nanopore sequencing of DNA and the origin of cellular life.