Dr. David E. Shaw Selected to Receive 2018 IEEE-CS Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award

LOS ALAMITOS, Calif., 18 October 2018 —Dr. David E. Shaw, chief scientist of D. E. Shaw Research and a senior research fellow at the Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics at Columbia University, has been named recipient of the 2018 IEEE Computer Society Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award.

Dr. Shaw is being recognized "for the design of special-purpose supercomputers for biomolecular simulations."

The Seymour Cray Computer Engineering award is one of the IEEE Computer Society’s highest awards, and is presented in recognition of innovative contributions to high-performance computing systems that best exemplify the creative spirit demonstrated by Seymour Cray. The award consists of a crystal memento, a certificate, and a $10,000 honorarium.

Since 2001, Dr. Shaw has devoted his time to hands-on research in the field of computational biochemistry. His lab is currently involved in the development of new algorithms and machine architectures for high-speed biomolecular simulations, and in the application of such simulations to basic scientific research and computer-aided drug design.

Dr. Shaw was appointed to the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology by President Clinton in 1994, and again by President Obama in 2009. He is a two-time winner of the ACM Gordon Bell Prize, and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2007, to the National Academy of Engineering in 2012, and to the National Academy of Sciences in 2014.

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.

Previous Seymour Cray Award recipients include Gordon Bell, Ken Batcher, John Cocke, Glen Culler, William J. Dally, Monty Denneau, Alan Gara, John L. Hennessy, Peter Kogge, Kenichi Miura, Steven L. Scott, Charles Seitz, Burton J. Smith, Marc Snir, Steven Wallach, Tadashi Watanabe, and Mateo Valero.

The 2018 IEEE Computer Society Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award will be presented to Dr. Shaw at the SC18 Conference awards plenary session in Dallas, Texas on Tuesday morning, 13 November 2018.

For more information about IEEE Computer Society awards, visit www.computer.org/awards.