David Williamson, professor in the Department of Information Science in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science and professor of Operations Research and Information Engineering (ORIE), has agreed to extend his appointment as Chair of the Department of Information Science, a role he has held since July 1, 2021, for an additional year.
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Williamson received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under Professor Michel X. Goemans, with whom he received the 2022 American Mathematical Society (AMS) Steele Prize for Seminal Contribution to Research for their paper, “Improved Approximation Algorithms for Maximum Cut and Satisfiability Problems Using Semidefinite Programming.
After a postdoc at Cornell under Professor Éva Tardos, he spent several years working for IBM before returning to Cornell in 2004 as a professor with a joint appointment in the School of Operations Research and Information Engineering (ORIE) and the Department of Information Science.
Well-known for his work in the area of discrete optimization, his research focuses on finding efficient algorithms for hard discrete optimization problems, with attention to approximation algorithms for problems in network design, facility location, and scheduling. For his many contributions, he has been recognized as an ACM Fellow and SIAM Fellow, and has received several awards for his research including the 1994 Tucker Prize from the Mathematical Programming Society and the 2000 Fulkerson Prize from the Mathematical Programming Society and the American Mathematical Society. He has served as an associate editor on several journals and was the editor-in-chief of the SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics.