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About David
David Woodruff is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Davis Graduate School of Management in the Business & Economics faculty, specializing in Business Analytics and Operations Management. He earned a Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences from Northwestern University in 1990, an M.S. in Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management from Stanford University in 1980, and a B.S. in Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management from Stanford University in 1979. Woodruff joined UC Davis as Assistant Professor in 1990, was promoted to Associate Professor in 1996 and Professor in 2001. He served as Associate Dean for Instructional Programs from 2007 to 2010 and 2016 to 2017, and as Associate Dean of academic affairs from July 2023 to July 2025. Prior professional roles include Programmer Analyst at RMT, Inc. (1985-1987), Lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater (1985-1987), President of Jewelers Computer Applications, Inc. (1982-1986), and Manager of Computing Facilities at Silvar-Lisco, Inc. (1980-1981).
Woodruff's research focuses on computational aspects of optimal decision making, particularly stochastic programming and planning under uncertainty with applications in operations, logistics, energy planning, and forest management. He co-developed Pyomo, an open-source Python-based optimization modeling system that received the 2019 INFORMS Computing Society Prize and 2016 R&D 100 Award, and PySP for modeling stochastic programs. His books include "Pyomo: Optimization Modeling in Python" (Springer, 2012; second edition 2017), "Introduction to Computational Optimization Models for Production Planning in a Supply Chain" (Springer, 2003), and "Advances in Computational and Stochastic Optimization, Logic Programming, and Heuristic Search" (Kluwer Academic Press, 1998). Key publications feature "Progressive Hedging Innovations for a Class of Stochastic Mixed-Integer Resource Allocation Problems" (Computational Management Science, 2011; best paper award), "Pyomo: Modeling and Solving Mathematical Programs in Python" (Mathematical Programming Computation, 2011), and "Scalable Heuristics for a Class of Chance Constrained Stochastic Programs" (INFORMS Journal on Computing, 2010). Woodruff was named 2024 INFORMS Fellow, served as Editor-in-Chief of INFORMS Journal on Computing (2013-2019), and held editorial positions including Chair of INFORMS Computing Society (2001-2003). His work has over 13,000 citations on Google Scholar.