Garud Iyengar is the Avanessians Director of the Data Science Institute (DSI) and a Professor of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research at Columbia Engineering. As the Avanessians Director of DSI, he leads education and research initiatives for Columbia’s central hub of data science scholarship with more than 400 affiliated faculty. He also co-leads the University’s Artificial Intelligence Initiative in partnership with Jeannette Wing, the Executive Vice President for Research, and Shih-Fu Chang, Dean of The Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science.

His research interests are broadly in the areas of control, machine learning, and optimization. His current projects focus on the areas of large-scale power systems and supply chains, causal inference, large scale game solving, and modeling of cellular processes. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, Office of Naval Research, and the Department of Energy, among others. He is the author of over 90 publications and chapters, holds two patents, was an Amazon Scholar from 2019-2024, and was elected an INFORMS Fellow in 2018.

Iyengar, who has been on the faculty since 1998, has held a range of academic leadership roles. He was Columbia Engineering’s Senior Vice for Dean of Research and Academic Programs from 2021-2024, and Chair of the Industrial Engineering and Operations Research department from 2013-2019. At DSI, where he has been deeply involved since the institute’s 2012 founding, he was Associate Director for Research from 2017-19 and also played a critical role in shaping important programs like the DSI Seed Funds Initiative and the Postdoctoral Scholars Program.

Iyengar received a BTech in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology in 1993 and a PhD in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 1998. 

Executive Assistant: Maisem Jaloudi