Dear colleagues:
I write to announce that I have appointed Cliff Stein, Wai T. Chang Professor of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research and of Computer Science, to be Interim Director of the Data Science Institute. He is already working closely with Jeannette Wing, newly appointed Executive Vice President for Research, on this transition in leadership.
Cliff joined Columbia in 2001 following nearly 10 years in the Department of Computer Science at Dartmouth College. From 2008-2013 he served as Chair of Columbia’s Industrial Engineering and Operations Research Department, and he has been integral to the success of the Data Science Institute as its Associate Director of Research. Cliff’s academic research focuses on the design and analysis of algorithms, combinatorial optimization, green computing, and big data. He received a BSE in Computer Science from Princeton University and his PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has occupied a variety of editorial positions including the journals ACM Transactions on Algorithms, Mathematical Programming, Journal of Algorithms, SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics, and Operations Research Letters. He is the co-author of two textbooks, one of which, Introduction to Algorithms, with T. Cormen, C. Leiserson and R. Rivest, is currently the best-selling textbook in algorithms, has sold over three quarters of a million copies, and been translated into 15 languages. He is also the winner of several prestigious awards including an NSF Career Award and an Alfred Sloan Research Fellowship, and is an ACM Fellow.
I am grateful to Cliff for agreeing to steward the Data Science Institute, an essential and vital part of our University community, through this interim period.
Sincerely,
Lee C. Bollinger
