David Applegate

David Applegate is a Research Scientist at Google NYC, in the Large Scale Optimization group within the Algorithms and Optimization team. He came to Google in 2016, after 16 years as a Lead Member of Technical Staff in the AT&T Shannon Research Laboratory. Prior to that he spent 4 years as an Associate Professor at Rice University and 4 years as a Member of Technical Staff in AT&T Bell Labs. He has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon (1991) and a B.S. in Computer Science and Math from the University of Dayton (1984).

David's primary research interests include large-scale mathematical optimization and applied algorithms and data structures. His secondary interests include networking, combinatorial puzzles, and integer sequences. He was named an AT&T Fellow (2013), and has received the Frederick W. Lanchester prize (INFORMS, 2007, for The Traveling Salesman: A Computational Study), the William R. Bennet prize (IEEE Communications Society, 2007, for “Making Routing Robust to Changing Traffic Demands: Algorithms and Evaluation”), the Beale-Orchard-Hays prize (Mathematical Optimization Society, 2000, for "On the Solution of Traveling Salesman Problems”), and the George Pólya award (MAA, 2013, for “Carryless Arithmetic Mod 10”). He also had a winning entry in the 8th International Obfuscated C Code Contest (1991).

David also enjoys rock climbing and supporting the New Jersey Devils and New York Red Bulls.