David Elliot Shaw (born March 29, 1951) is an American billionaire scientist and former hedge fund manager. He founded D. E. Shaw & Co., a hedge fund company which was once described by Fortune magazine as "the most intriguing and mysterious force on Wall Street". A former assistant professor 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. Early life and education Shaw was raised in Los Angeles, California. His father was a theoretical physicist who specialised in plasma and fluid flows, and his mother is an artist and educator. They divorced when he was 12. His stepfather, Irving Pfeffer, was professor of finance at University of California, Los Angeles, and the author of papers supporting the efficient market hypothesis. Shaw earned a bachelor's degree summa cum laude from the University of California, San Diego, a PhD from Stanford University in 1980, and then became an assistant professor of the department of computer science at Columbia University. 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. Investment career 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 2007, Shaw was elected as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. 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. D. E. Shaw In 1988 he started his own hedge fund, D. E. Shaw & Co,