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 to $2.5 billion. In 2009, he was appointed by President Obama again to the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.
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.
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