Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science announced this Fall the appointment of David Williamson as the chair of the Department of Information Science, and that Martin Wells is extending his chairship of the Department of Statistics and Data Science.
“I am delighted to welcome David as the new chair, and am thankful for Marty’s continued dedication and leadership,” said Dean Kavita Bala. “They bring a wealth of experience as accomplished faculty members and academic leaders, and I am excited to work with them to advance the missions of the departments and college.”
Williamson succeeds Steve Jackson, associate professor of information science, who has held the role since July 2018. Williamson received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under Professor Michel X. Goemans. After a postdoc at Cornell, he spent several years working for IBM before returning to Cornell in 2004 as a professor in the school of Operations Research and Information Engineering, and the Faculty of Computing and Information Science.
Well-known for his work on the topic of approximation algorithms, Williamson has been awarded several prizes, including the 1994 Tucker Prize from the Mathematical Programming Society and the 2000 Fulkerson Prize from the Mathematical Programming Society and the American Mathematical Society. He has served as an associate editor on several journals and was the editor-in-chief of the SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics. His research focuses on finding efficient algorithms for hard discrete optimization problems, with a focus on approximation algorithms for problems in network design, facility location, and scheduling. For his many contributions, he has been recognized as an ACM Fellow and SIAM Fellow.
Wells, the Charles A. Alexander Professor of Statistical Sciences, joined the Cornell community in 1987 and has served as a department chair for a number of Cornell statistics groups before the founding of the Department of Statistics and Data Science. In addition to his positions within Cornell Bowers CIS, Wells is also a professor of social statistics, professor of biostatistics and epidemiology at Weill Cornell Medicine, an elected member of the Cornell Law School Faculty, as well as the director of research in the School of Industrial and Labor Relations.
He has served on high-level national statistical committees and as editor-in-chief of ASA-SIAM Series on Statistics and Applied Probability, co-editor of The Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, and as the editor of The Journal of the American Statistical Association-Reviews. He is also a fellow of the American Statistical Association, Institute of Mathematical Statistics and the Royal Statistical Society.
Wells teaches statistical methodology to undergraduate and graduate students in fields such as agriculture, biology, epidemiology, finance, law, medicine, nutrition, social science, and veterinary medicine as well as graduate courses in statistics. His research interests center on both applied and theoretical statistics.