David Norman Schramm was an astrophysicist. He was born on October 25, 1945, in St. Louis, Missouri. He earned a Ph.D in physics at Caltech in 1971, and went on to become one of the world's foremost experts on the Big Bang theory. He was an early proponent of the theory of dark matter.

Schramm received the Robert J. Trumpler Award of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific in 1974, the Helen B. Warner Prize for Astronomy from the American Astronomical Society in 1978, and he was awarded the Julius Edgar Lilienfeld Prize from the American Physical Society in 1993.

Schramm was killed on December 19, 1997 when the plane he was piloting crashed near Denver, Colorado. He was the sole occupant of the Swearingen-Fairchild SA-226 aircraft. According to the National Transportation Safety Board report on the accident, the cause of the crash was "(t)he pilot inadvertently stalling the airplane and his subsequent spatial disorientation which prevented him from maintaining airplane control. Factors were excessive workload on the pilot and the dark night light conditions". At the time of his death he was Vice President for Research and Louis Block Distinguished Service Professor in the Physical Sciences at the University of Chicago.