A dimension reduction method called Discrete Empirical Interpolation (DEIM) is proposed and shown to dramatically reduce the computational complexity of the popular Proper Orthogonal Decomposition (POD) method for constructing reduced-order models for unsteady and/or parametrized nonlinear partial differential equations (PDEs). In the presence of a general nonlinearity, the standard POD-Galerkin technique reduces dimension in the sense that far fewer variables are present, but the complexity of evaluating the nonlinear term remains that of the original problem. Here we describe DEIM as a modification of POD that reduces the complexity as well as the dimension of general nonlinear systems of ordinary differential equations (ODEs). It is, in particular, applicable to ODEs arising from finite difference discretization of unsteady time dependent PDE and/or parametrically dependent steady state problems. Our contribution is a greatly simplified description of Empirical Interpolation in a finite dimensional setting. The method possesses an error bound on the quality of approximation. An application of DEIM to a finite difference discretization of the 1-D FitzHugh-Nagumo equations is shown to reduce the dimension from 1024 to order 5 variables with negligible error over a long-time integration that fully captures non-linear limit cycle behavior. We also demonstrate applicability in higher spatial dimensions with similar state space dimension reduction and accuracy results.