David E Shaw

Bio

The firm was founded in 1988 by David E. Shaw. While Dr. Shaw remains involved in certain higher-level strategic decisions affecting the investment management businesses of the D. E. Shaw group, he is no longer actively involved in their day-to-day operations. 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 Biomedical Informatics at Columbia's medical school. 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 was a member of the Study Group on Presidential Science and Technology Advisory Assets at the Center for the Study of the Presidency, and has testified before several Congressional committees and the National Science Board on various public policy issues related to science, technology, and education, and to their respective roles in ensuring national economic competitiveness. Dr. Shaw is also a member of the executive committee of the Council on Competitiveness, and co-chairs the steering committee for the Council's federally funded High-Performance Computing Initiative, which aims to strengthen the nation's scientific supercomputing infrastructure. Dr. Shaw is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and serves on the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Academies. He is also a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and was elected to its board of directors in 1998. 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.