David Shaw (CEO)

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David E. Shaw (born c. 1951) is the founder and current chief executive officer of D. E. Shaw, a hedge fund company which has been described by Fortune magazine as "the most intriguing and mysterious force on Wall Street." Shaw is a billionaire, listed in 2006 as one of the 400 richest people in America. He made his fortune exploiting inefficiencies in financial markets with the help of sophisticated computer models. In 1996, Fortune magazine referred to him as "King Quant" because of his firm's expertise in quantitative trading.^[1]

1 Background
2 See also
3 References
4 External links

[edit] Background

The son of an efficent markets theorist, Shaw obtained his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1980, then becoming a faculty member of the Department of Computer Science at Columbia University. While at Columbia, Shaw led 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. He also founded and served as president and CEO of Stanford Systems Corporation.

In 1986, he joined Morgan Stanley's quantitative trading unit, as vice president in charge of automated analytical trading technology. In 1988 he started his own hedge fund, "D.E. Shaw," which employed proprietary software and techniques for quantitative trading.

In 1994, Shaw was appointed by President Clinton to the President's Committee 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, and currently serves as its treasurer.

According to Trader Monthly, in 2005 Dr. Shaw was the eighth-highest paid hedge fund manager in the country earning an estimated $400-500 million. In 2006, he entered the Forbes 400 with an estimated net worth of $1.0 billion.^[2] According to Forbes magazine, he is now no longer involved in day-to-day operations at D.E. Shaw, but is instead pursuing an interest in biosciences, funding medical research using computational techniques to develop drugs. As such, he holds the title of chief scientist of D. E. Shaw Research, LLC. He is also chairman of the Schrödinger companies, which produce software used for drug discovery.