David Woodruff

Professor and Associate Dean of Academic Affairs

Ph.D., Northwestern University

Research Expertise 
Business analytics, operations and management science, planning and scheduling under uncertainty, optimization

Professor David Woodruff's research concerns computational aspects of optimal decision making. He is particularly interested in problems with a mix of discrete and continuous choices with multiple time stages when there is significant uncertainty. His research includes solution algorithms, problem representation and modeling language support. He has worked on applications in operations, logistics, science, and has been involved recently in a number of applications in electrical energy planning and scheduling.

He is one of the developers of Pyomo, (www.pyomo.org) that won the INFORMS Computing Society prize in 2019 and an R&D 100 award in 2016.

From 2013 to 2019 he was editor-in-chief of the INFORMS Journal on Computing, which is a publication of the Institute for Operations Research and Management Science. His paper with Jean-Paul Watson titled “Progressive Hedging Innovations for a Class of Stochastic Mixed-integer Resource Allocation Problems” shared the best paper of 2011 award in the journal Computational Management Science. He was the UC Davis principal investigator for the ARPAe (Department of Energy) grant Improved Power System Operation Using Advanced Stochastic Optimization awarded in 2012. He is presently principal investigator for additional Department of Energy funded research on grid planning in the presence of uncertainty due to renewables.

Woodruff teaches the core course Data Analysis for Managers. He sometimes teaches Managing for Operational Excellence and the Management Science course.

Woodruff earned his Ph.D. in industrial engineering and management sciences from Northwestern University. He received both his Master of Science (M.S.) and Bachelor of Science (B.S.) in industrial engineering and engineering management from Stanford University.

He was appointed associate dean of academic affairs on July 1, 2023.

Awards

  • 2019 INFORMS Computing Society Prize for Pyomo Annual award for the best English language paper or group of related papers dealing with the Operations Research/Computer Science interface
  • Research Grant, Department of Energy Green Electricity Networks, "Improved Power System Operations Using Advanced Stochastic Optimization," Co-Principal Investigator, 2012-14.
  • Electives Courses Teacher of the Year, UC Davis Graduate School of Management, 1994-95, 1996-97, 2000, 2001.  
  • Research Grant, National Science Foundation, "Identification of Outliers in Multivariate Data," 1996.
  • Dissertation Competition Runner-up, Production and Operations Management Society (POMS), 1991.
  • JD Scaife Award, Institution of Manufacturing Engineers, “CONWIP: A Pull Alternative to Kanban,” 1990.
  • Doctoral Colloquium, Operations Research Society of America, 1988.