David Shmoys is a Professor of Operations Research and Information Engineering as well as of Computer Science at Cornell University, and is a visiting faculty member at the Sloan School of Management at MIT for the current academic year. He obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley in 1984, and held postdoctoral positions at MSRI in Berkeley and Harvard University, and a faculty position at MIT before joining the Cornell faculty.

He is a Fellow of the ACM, was an NSF Presidential Young Investigator, and has served on numerous editorial boards, including Mathematics of Operations Research (for which he is currently an Associate Editor), Operations Research, ORSA Journal on Computing, Mathematical Programming, and the SIAM Journals of both Computing and Discrete Mathematics, where for the latter he also served as Editor-in-chief. He has been the advisor for 18 graduated PhD students, and his former students are currently on the faculties of many leading universities and research labs, including MIT, Waterloo, Brown, Maryland, Georgetown, and D-Wave. Shmoys's research has focused on the design and analysis of efficient algorithms for discrete optimization problems, with applications including scheduling, inventory theory, computational biology, and most recently, computational sustainability, in particular, on the effective use of resources in species distribution management. His work has highlighted the central role that linear programming plays in the design of approximation algorithms for NP-hard problems, and he is the co-author (with David Williamson) of a forthcoming textbook on the subject.