Rate My Professor David Brown

David B. Brown is the Snow Family Business Professor in Decision Sciences and Faculty Director of the Center for Energy, Development and Global Environment (EDGE) at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. He received a Bachelor of Science and a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2006. Professor Brown has been on the faculty at Fuqua since completing his doctorate. His research focuses on designing and analyzing algorithms for decision problems involving uncertainty and complex tradeoffs, with methodological contributions that span application areas including energy systems, revenue management, dynamic pricing, stochastic scheduling, and sequential search. He has contributed to projects such as the GRACE initiative funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy, aimed at improving electricity grid operations under renewable energy uncertainty. Professor Brown’s work has appeared in journals including Management Science and Operations Research. He serves as Area Editor for the Decision Analysis Area at Operations Research and has received multiple research awards from the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS). At Fuqua, he has taught courses such as Decision Models, Data Analytics and Applications, Probability and Statistics, and Convex Optimization, and he has received teaching awards in multiple programs. He was appointed Snow Family Business Distinguished Professor in 2024.

Professor Brown’s appointments include Professor of Business Administration since 2020. His research interests encompass analytics, optimization, stochastic models, and dynamic programming, with particular emphasis on energy and sustainability applications. He participates in grants including the IUCRC Phase I Duke University Center for Innovation in Risk-analysis for Climate Adaption and Decision-making and continues to advance quantitative methods for complex decision-making under uncertainty.