He was an emeritus Ancell Professor of Physics at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts and a senior research associate at California Institute of Technology.

(Summa cum laude) in 1949 at Brooklyn College in New York, and his master's degree 1950 at Harvard, where he also earned his doctorate in 1953, with a thesis entitled "Relativistic Two Body Interactions".

In the framework of that formalism, there is also a straightforward way to define globally quantities like energy or, equivalently, mass (so-called ADM mass/energy) which, in general relativity, is not trivial at all.

With Peter van Nieuwenhuizen he demonstrated the one loop nonrenormalizability of general relativity plus electromagnetism, plus Yang-Mills, plus Dirac fermions, and plus a cosmological constant.

The apparent impasse revealed by these efforts was partially overcome in 1976, following a strikingly independent approach from the contemporary work of Daniel Freedman, Sergio Ferrara and Peter van Nieuwenhuizen, when Deser and Bruno Zumino demonstrated that a spin 3/2 field can be added to general relativity to produce a consistent, locally supersymmetric theory called supergravity.