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David B. Brown

Snow Family Business Distinguished Professor
Fuqua School of Business
Fuqua School of Business, 90120, Durham, NC 27708

Overview


David B. Brown is the Snow Family Business Professor in Decision Sciences and the Faculty Director for the Center for Energy, Development and Global Environment (EDGE) at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business.

Professor Brown's research focuses on designing and analyzing algorithms for decision problems involving uncertainty and complex tradeoffs. This work is methodological in nature and cuts across various application areas. Part of the GRACE project funded by the US Department of Energy's Advanced Research Projects Agency, Professor Brown is actively working with researchers at Duke and several other institutions on improving the efficiency and reliability of electricity grid operations in the face of uncertainty in renewable energy sources.

His recent research also includes developing and analyzing solution techniques for problems such as network revenue management, dynamic pricing in shared vehicle systems, stochastic scheduling problems, and sequential search problems. Professor Brown's research has appeared in publications such as Management Science and Operations Research, and the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) has recognized his research with several awards. At Fuqua, he has taught Decision Models, Data Analytics and Applications, Probability and Statistics, and Convex Optimization, and he has won teaching awards in multiple programs.

Professor Brown received a Bachelor's and Master's of Science in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University and has been on the faculty at Fuqua since receiving his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT.

Current Appointments & Affiliations


Snow Family Business Distinguished Professor · 2024 - Present Fuqua School of Business
Professor of Business Administration · 2020 - Present Fuqua School of Business

In the News


Published March 19, 2024
Duke Awards 32 New Distinguished Professorships for 2024
Published October 27, 2023
Sustainability Discussions On Tap for Steelman’s Upcoming Trip to Asia
Published October 24, 2023
An Approach to Improve Efficiency of Electric Utilities

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Recent Publications


Fluid Policies, Reoptimization, and Performance Guarantees in Dynamic Resource Allocation

Journal Article Operations Research · March 1, 2025 Many sequential decision problems involve deciding how to allocate shared resources across a set of independent systems at each point in time. A classic example is the restless bandit problem, in which a budget constraint limits the selection of arms. Flui ... Full text Cite

Sequential Search with Acquisition Uncertainty

Journal Article Management Science · November 1, 2024 We study a variation of the classical Pandora's problem in which a decision maker (DM) sequentially explores alternatives from a given set and learns their values while trying to acquire the best alternative. The variations in the model we study are (i) al ... Full text Cite

Technical Note-On the Strength of Relaxations of Weakly Coupled Stochastic Dynamic Programs

Journal Article Operations Research · November 1, 2023 Many stochastic dynamic programs (DPs) have a weakly coupled structure in that a set of linking constraints in each period couples an otherwise independent collection of subproblems. Two widely studied approximations of such problems are approximate linear ... Full text Cite
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Recent Grants


A Grid that's Risk-Aware for Clean Electricity - GRACE

ResearchInvestigator · Awarded by Department of Energy · 2020 - 2025

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Education, Training & Certifications


Massachusetts Institute of Technology · 2006 Ph.D.