Dr. David Shmoys

Biography

David Shmoys obtained his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California at Berkeley in 1984. He held postdoctoral positions at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley and Harvard University before taking a faculty position at MIT, and later joining Cornell University. He has served as the Chair of the Provost's 'radical collaboration' task force on data science and is the Associate Director of the Institute of Computational Sustainability at Cornell. Shmoys is a Fellow of the ACM, INFORMS, and SIAM, and was recognized as a NSF Presidential Young Investigator. He has actively contributed to numerous editorial boards and currently serves as a co-Area Editor for Optimization in Operations Research. With a strong focus on design and analysis of efficient algorithms for discrete optimization problems, he has applications in scheduling, inventory theory, and computational biology. His work has underscored the significant role linear programming plays in designing approximation algorithms for NP-hard problems. Notably, his book 'Design of Approximation Algorithms,' co-authored with David Williamson, was awarded the 2013 Lanchester Prize by INFORMS. In addition to theoretical studies, Shmoys has engaged in practical applications of these techniques in diverse fields such as genomics, medical scheduling, and COVID epidemiological modeling.

Research Interests

Experience

Awards