Shaw received a bachelor"s degree summa cum laude from the University of California, San Diego and obtained his Doctor of Philosophy from Stanford University in 1980, then became a faculty member of the Department of Computer Science at Columbia University.
A former faculty member in the computer science department at Columbia University, Shaw made his fortune exploiting inefficiencies in financial markets with the help of state-of-the-art high speed computer networks. In 1996, Fortune magazine referred to him as "King Quant" because of his firm"s pioneering role in high-speed quantitative trading. In 2001, Shaw turned to full-time scientific research in computational biochemistry, more specifically molecular dynamics simulations of proteins.
While at Columbia, Shaw conducted research in massively parallel computing with the Non-Von supercomputer.
This supercomputer was composed of processing elements in a tree structure meant to be used for fast relational database searches. Earlier in his career, he founded Stanford Systems Corporation.
In 1986, he joined Morgan Stanley, as vice president for technology in Nunzio Tartaglia"s automated proprietary trading group. In 1994, Shaw was appointed by President Clinton to the President"s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, where he was chairman of the Panel on Educational Technology.
In 2000, he was elected to the board of directors of the American Association for the Advancement of Science served as its treasurer 2000-2010.
In 2009, he was appointed by President Obama again to the President"s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. In 2012, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering and in 2014 was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Doctorate. East. Shaw
In 1988 he started his own hedge fund, "Doctorate. East. Shaw & Company", which employed proprietary algorithms for securities trading.
In 2008, Forbes estimated his wealth at $2.5 billion.
He is also a Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics at Columbia University and an Adjunct Professor of Biomedical Informatics at Columbia"s medical school. Shaw is Chief Scientist of Doctorate. East. Shaw Research, which conducts interdisciplinary research in the field of computational biochemistry.
According to the Institutional Investor’s Alpha magazine"s annual ranking for 2014, Doctorate. East. Shaw, who made $530 million in 2014, and James H. Simons of Renaissance Technologies who made $1.2 billion were among the top 25 earners in the hedge fund industry. They are both "quantitative strategists who founded firms that build algorithms for trading."Doctorate. East. Shaw & Company
National Academy of Sciences.
