David E. Shaw
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David Elliot Shaw (born 1951 in New York) is a computer scientist and computational biochemist who founded D. E. Shaw & Co., a hedge fund company which has been 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 sophisticated computer models. In 1996, Fortune magazine referred to him as "King Quant" because of his firm's expertise in quantitative trading.[1] In 2001, he returned to full-time scientific research, and now leads D. E. Shaw Research, an independent laboratory dedicated to basic research in bioinformatics.
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[edit] Background
Shaw 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 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, as vice president in charge of automated analytical trading technology. In 1988 he started his own hedge fund, "D.E. Shaw & Co.", which employed proprietary software and techniques for quantitative 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, and currently serves as its treasurer. In 2007, Shaw was elected as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Shaw has not been actively involved in the day-to-day operations of D.E. Shaw's financial units since 2001. The 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 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.
[edit] References
- ^ [http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1996/02/05/207353/index.htm "Wall Street's King Quant David Shaw's Secret Formulas Pile Up Money. Now He Wants a Piece of the Net."], February 5, 1996, Fortune magazine
