David Shmoys

David Shmoys obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley in 1984, and held postdoctoral positions at MSRI in Berkeley and Harvard University, and a faculty position at MIT before joining the Cornell faculty. He is Chair of the Provost’s “radical collaboration” task force on data science and Associate Director of the Institute of Computational Sustainability at Cornell University.

He is a Fellow of the ACM, INFORMS, and of SIAM, was an NSF Presidential Young Investigator, and has served on numerous editorial boards, including Operations Research (for which he is currently co-Area Editor for Optimization), Mathematics of Operations Research (for which he is currently an Associate Editor), ORSA Journal on Computing, Mathematical Programming, Research in the Mathematical Sciences, and the SIAM Journals of both Computing and Discrete Mathematics, where for the latter he also served as Editor-in-Chief. He has been the advisor for 27 graduated Ph.D. students, and his former students are currently on the faculties of many leading universities and research labs, including MIT, Waterloo, Brown, Maryland, Georgetown, and D-Wave.

Shmoys’ research has focused on the design and analysis of efficient algorithms for discrete optimization problems, with applications including scheduling, inventory theory, computational biology, and most recently, comptuational sustainability. His work has highlighted the central role that linear programming plays in the design of approximation algorithms for NP-hard problems; his recent book, co-authored with David Williamson, The Design of Approximation Algorithms, was awarded the 2013 Lanchester Prize by INFORMS.

His paper, “Analytics and Bikes: Riding Tandem with Motivate to Improve Mobility”, joint with Daniel Freund, Shane Henderson, and Eoin O’Mahony, was awarded the 2018 INFORMS Daniel H. Wagner Prize.