David Shmoys

Lyft & Cornell University

David Shmoys is the Laibe/Acheson Professor of Business Management and Leadership Studies at Cornell University in the School of Operations Research and Information Engineering, and the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University. Dr. Shmoys also serves as a Research Consultant to Lyft.

His research interests include algorithms for optimization problems, with applications including scheduling, inventory theory, computational biology, network design, and computational sustainability.

Most recently, his work has focused on issues in mobility and the sharing economy, with particular attention to the development of algorithmic tools to design and support bike-sharing systems, for which he received the 2018 INFORMS Wagner Prize for Excellence in Operations Research Practice.

Dr. Shmoys received the 2013 INFORMS Lanchester Prize, which is awarded for the best contribution to operations research and the management sciences, for his book, “The Design of Approximation Algorithms.” He is a Fellow of INFORMS, the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), and Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), and was an NSF Presidential Young Investigator; he has served on numerous editorial boards, and is currently an area editor for optimization for the journal Operations Research and an associate editor of the journal Mathematics of Operations Research.

Dr. Shmoys obtained his PhD in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley, and held postdoctoral positions at MSRI in Berkeley and Harvard University, and a faculty position at MIT before joining the Cornell faculty.