Daniel Alan Spielman was born in Philadelphia in March of 1970.  He
received his B.A. in Mathematics and Computer Science from Yale in
1992, and his Ph.D in Applied Mathematics from M.I.T. in 1995. He
spent a year as a NSF Mathematical Sciences post-doc in the Computer
Science Department at U.C. Berkeley, and then taught in the Applied
Mathematics Department at M.I.T. until 2005.  Since 2006, he has been
a Professor of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science at Yale
University.

The awards he has received include the 1995 ACM Doctoral Dissertation
Award, the 2002 IEEE Information Theory Paper Award, and most recently
the 2008 Gödel Prize for his work on Smoothed Analysis. His main
research interests include the design and analysis of algorithms,
graph theory, and combinatorial scientific computing.