David E. Shaw serves as Chief Scientist of D. E. Shaw Research and as a Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics at Columbia University. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1980, served on the faculty of the Computer Science Department at Columbia until 1986, and founded the D. E. Shaw group in 1988. Since 2001, Dr. Shaw has devoted his time to hands-on research in the field of computational biochemistry. He is now personally involved in the development of new algorithms and machine architectures for high-speed molecular dynamics simulations of biological macromolecules, and in the application of such simulations to basic scientific research in structural biology and biochemistry and to the process of computer-aided drug design. Although he leads the lab’s research efforts in his role as Chief Scientist, his focus is largely technical, with limited involvement in operational and administrative management.
In 1994, President Clinton appointed Dr. Shaw to the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and was elected to its board of directors in 1998. Dr. Shaw is also a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and serves on the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Academies.