IEOR Professor Donald Goldfarb Named as Interim Dean

Donald Goldfarb, Alexander and Hermine Avanessians Professor of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research, has been appointed interim dean at Columbia Engineering, effective July 3, 2012. He has been a faculty member at Columbia Engineering since 1982, serving as Acting Dean of the School in 1994-95, chair of the IEOR Department from 1984 to 2002, and Executive Vice Dean in 2012. He succeeds Dean Feniosky Peña-Mora, who stepped down as Dean on July 2.

 

“We have an extremely strong school, superb faculty, and excellent students—in short, an incredible community of scholars—and I am looking forward to working with them all in my new role as interim dean,” said Goldfarb.

 

Goldfarb's teaching and research interests include algorithms for linear, quadratic, semidefinite, convex and general nonlinear programming, network flows, large sparse systems, and applications in robust optimization, finance, and imaging. As a leader in his field, Goldfarb was named the inaugural Alexander and Hermine Avanessians Professor in 2002. One recent result of his work has been to develop an algorithm to optimize MRI and CT scan images so that patients are subject to only one-fifth the previous radiation levels to produce an appropriate image.

 

He has published more than 90 technical papers and served on the editorial boards of several journals, including editor in chief of Mathematical Programming, editor of the SIAM (Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics) Journal on Optimization and the SIAM Journal on Numerical Analysis, and associate editor of Operations Research and Mathematics of Computation. He has been a member of the councils of the Mathematical Programming Society and the American Mathematical Society, numerous technical society program and award committees, and advisory committees to various universities and government research agencies.

 

In 1995, Goldfarb was awarded the Institute for Operations Research and Management Sciences Prize for Research Excellence in the interface between operations research and computer science. He also received honorable mention for the 1996 SIAM Optimization Prize and was honored with the 1999 Great Teachers Award from the Society of Columbia Graduates. He was recently named a 2012 SIAM Fellow.

 

Before coming to Columbia, Goldfarb held positions as professor and acting chair in the Department of Computer Science at the City College of New York, visiting professor in the Department of Computer Science and at the School of Operations Research and Industrial Engineering at Cornell University, and assistant research scientist at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University.

 

Goldfarb earned a B.Ch.E. from Cornell in 1963 and M.A. and Ph.D. from Princeton in 1965 and 1966, respectively.