Donald Goldfarb, the Alexander and Hermine Avanessians Professor Emeritus of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research, has been at Columbia Engineering since 1982, serving as acting dean of the School in 1994 to 95 and chair of the IEOR Department from 1984 to 2002. He also served as executive vice dean immediately prior to his appointment as Interim Dean in July 2012. Professsor Goldfarb’s current research interests are focused on developing algorithms for solving optimization problems that arise in machine learning, and in particular, those that arise in training deep neural networks. Professor Goldfarb earned a B.Ch.E. from Cornell, and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Princeton.

He was a professor and acting chair in the Department of Computer Science at City College of New York before joining Columbia Engineering. Professor Goldfarb is well-known as one of the developers of the Broyden–Fletcher–Goldfarb–Shanno (BFGS) algorithm and the steepest edge simplex method for linear programming. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics and a recipient of the INFORMS John Von Neumann Theory Prize.