Garud Iyengar is the Avanessians Director of the Data Science Institute (DSI) and Professor of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research at Columbia Engineering. As Director of DSI, he leads education and research initiatives for Columbia's central hub of data science and AI scholarship with more than 400 affiliated faculty. He received his B.Tech. in Electrical Engineering from IIT Kanpur, and an MS and PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University. His research interests are broadly in control, machine learning and optimization. His current projects focus on the areas of large-scale power systems and supply chains, causal inference, and modeling of cellular processes. He was elected an INFORMS Fellow in 2018 and served as Chair of the Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research from 2013-19. He was an Amazon Scholar from 2019-2024 and Columbia Engineering's Senior Vice Dean for Research and Academic Programs from 2021-2024.