Clifford Stein  conducts research in the design and analysis of algorithms and in combinatorial optimization. He is particularly interested in the design of algorithms for hard-to-solve problems, arising in areas such as machine learning, large-scale computing and scheduling, and in designing efficient algorithms for manipulating large data. He designs algorithms for a variety of applications ranging from scheduling problems that arise in computer systems to problems that arise in industrial manufacturing facilities to logistics problems such as the management of elevators. He is also the co-author of the popular textbook, Introduction to Algorithms, which has sold over one million copies worldwide. He is a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), was chair of the Steering Committee for the Annual Symposium on Discrete Algorithms, and has received a Career grant and a Sloan Fellowship. He is currently serving as the interim director of Columbia’s Data Science Institute and holds a joint appointment in computer science. Stein received his PhD in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and his BSE in computer science from Princeton University.