David Shaw

While Dr. Shaw remains involved in certain higher-level strategic decisions affecting the investment management businesses of the D. E. Shaw group, the firm’s day-to-day operations are overseen by the firm’s Executive Committee. The vast majority of his time is now devoted to his role as chief scientist of D. E. Shaw Research, LLC, in which capacity he leads an interdisciplinary research group in the field of computational biochemistry and personally engages in hands-on scientific research in that field. He also holds appointments as a Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics at Columbia University and as an Adjunct Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics at Columbia’s medical school.

Dr. Shaw received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1980 and served on the faculty of the Computer Science Department at Columbia University until 1986, when he left to pursue the emerging field of computational finance. He initiated his work on computational biochemistry in 2001, began building the scientific team at D. E. Shaw Research in 2002, and resumed his affiliation with Columbia in 2005.

Dr. Shaw was appointed to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology by President Clinton in 1994, and again by President Obama in 2009. He is a two-time winner of the ACM Gordon Bell Prize, and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2007, to the National Academy of Engineering in 2012, and to the National Academy of Sciences in 2014.