Garud Iyengar As the Avanessians Director of DSI, Garud Iyengar leads education and research initiatives for Columbia’s central hub of data science scholarship with more than 400 affiliated faculty and co-leads the University’s Artificial Intelligence Initiative. 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. He was the Chair of the Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research from 2013-19. He has been an Amazon Scholar from 2019-2024. He was Columbia Engineering’s Senior Vice for Dean of Research and Academic Programs from 2021-2024. He is also an Amazon Scholar.