Biography

David Shaw is known for his portrayal of the "Platt Executive" in the 1988 thriller "Dangerous Love." This "film about dating in the '80s" was written and directed by Marty Ollstein, and stars Elliot Gould, Lawrence Monoson, and Anthony Geary. Shaw is listed 33rd in a cast of 36 in the credits (below "Platt Receptionist," but ahead of both "Biker" and "Second Stripper").

Shaw was also featured in a walk-on scene in the Sally Field and Tom Hanks film "Punchline," however, it did not end up included in the final cut of the film. Outside of his work in film, Shaw is the chief scientist of D. E. Shaw Research (DESRES), which uses computational technologies to understand the behavior of biologically and pharmaceutically significant molecules at an atomic level of detail, and to design precisely targeted, highly selective drugs for the treatment of various diseases. Under Shaw's leadership, DESRES conducts drug discovery programs both independently and in collaboration with other biopharmaceutical companies and research laboratories. DESRES's research, technologies, and pharmaceutical expertise have each played an important role in bringing multiple drugs into clinical trials.

In his role as chief scientist, Shaw oversees a team of leading researchers with backgrounds in a number of different scientific and technical fields, including computer architecture and engineering; computer science and machine learning; computational biology, chemistry and physics; and drug discovery and development. This group's intrinsically interdisciplinary work has resulted in several milestone achievements, including the design and construction of Anton, a special-purpose supercomputer for molecular dynamics (MD) simulation. Three generations of Anton machines have thus far been developed, each of which has executed biological MD simulations roughly 100 times faster than the fastest general-purpose supercomputers of its day. In recognition of their extraordinary performance and their significance for scientific and pharmaceutical research, Anton systems have twice been awarded the ACM Gordon Bell Prize, widely regarded as the highest honor in the field of high-performance computing.

Shaw received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1980, completing his dissertation, "Knowledge-Based Retrieval on a Relational Database Machine," under the supervision of Prof. Terry Winograd. He then served on the faculty of the computer science department at Columbia University until 1986, when he left to pursue the emerging field of computational finance. In 1988, he founded D. E. Shaw & Co., an investment and technology development firm. He stepped back from day-to-day management of the firm's operations in 2001, and began building the scientific team at DESRES in 2002. In addition to his role as chief scientist of DESRES, Dr. Shaw holds appointments at Columbia University as a Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, and as an Adjunct Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics. Shaw was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2012, and to the National Academy of Sciences in 2014.
- IMDb mini biography by: P