Donald James Cram was an American chemist who shared the 1987 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Jean-Marie Lehn and Charles J. Pedersen "for their development and use of molecules with structure-specific interactions of high selectivity." They were the founders of the field of host-guest chemistry. He was born on April 22, 1919 in Chester, Vermont. Cram was educated at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida, and at the University of Nebraska, and he received a doctorate in organic chemistry from Harvard University in 1947. He joined the faculty of the University of California at Los Angeles in 1947 and became a full professor there in 1956 and emeritus in 1990. In 1993, he received the National Medal Of Science.