David E. Shaw is the founder of D. E. Shaw & Co., which he established in 1988 after leaving academia and working in Morgan Stanley's automated proprietary trading group. A computer scientist by training, Shaw pioneered the use of computational and quantitative techniques in financial markets. He later stepped away from day-to-day management of the firm and now remains involved in certain strategic decisions while devoting much of his time to computational biochemistry research through D. E. Shaw Research.