David E. Shaw Biography

David Elliot Shaw (born March 29, 1951) is an American computer scientist and computational biochemist who founded D. E. Shaw & Co., a hedge fund company which was once described by Fortune magazine as "the most intriguing and mysterious force on Wall Street." A former faculty member in the computer science department at Columbia University, Shaw made his fortune exploiting inefficiencies in financial markets with the help of state-of-the-art high speed computer networks. In 1996, Fortune magazine referred to him as "King Quant" because of his firm's pioneering role in high-speed quantitative trading. In 2001, Shaw turned to full-time scientific research in computational biochemistry, more specifically molecular dynamics simulations of proteins.

Background

Shaw received a bachelor's degree summa cum laude from the University of California, San Diego and obtained his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1980, then became a faculty member of the Department of Computer Science at Columbia University. While at Columbia, Shaw conducted research in massively parallel computing with the Non-Von supercomputer. This supercomputer was composed of processing elements in a tree structure meant to be used for fast relational database searches. Earlier in his career, he founded Stanford Systems Corporation.

In 1986, he joined Morgan Stanley, as vice president for technology in Nunzio Tartaglia's automated proprietary trading group. In 1988 he started his own hedge fund, "D. E. Shaw & Co.", which employed proprietary algorithms for securities trading.

In 1994, Shaw was appointed by President Clinton to the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, where he was chairman of the Panel on Educational Technology. In 2000, he was elected to the board of directors of the American Association for the Advancement of Science served as its treasurer 2000-2010. In 2007, Shaw was elected as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2008, Forbes estimated his wealth at $2.5 billion. In 2009, he was appointed by President Obama again to the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. In 2012, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering.

Shaw is now Chief Scientist of D. E. Shaw Research, where he engages in hands-on research while leading an interdisciplinary research team in computational biochemistry. He is also a Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics at Columbia University and an Adjunct Professor of Biomedical Informatics at Columbia's medical school.

Personal life

Shaw is married to personal finance commentator and journalist Beth Kobliner. They are members of the Stephen Wise Synagogue in New York.

See also

• List of computer scientists
• D. E. Shaw & Co.
• D. E. Shaw Research
• Computational Chemistry
• Molecular Dynamics
• Hedge fund