Andrew Goldberg, PhD

Andrew V. Goldberg is an endowed chair full professor in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Lehigh University, having joined in July 2025 after more than a decade as a senior principal scientist at Amazon, and a career at the intersection of theoretical and applied algorithm design. Goldberg earned his bachelor’s degree in computer science also at Berkeley, then his doctorate in computer science from MIT in 1987, supported by a Hertz Fellowship beginning in 1985, with a thesis on efficient graph algorithms for sequential and parallel computers. He subsequently held positions at GTE Laboratories, Stanford University, NEC Research Institute, InterTrust Technologies, and Microsoft Research (for 12 years) before joining Amazon in 2014. Goldberg is best known for co-developing the push-relabel maximum flow algorithm with Robert Tarjan — a cornerstone of combinatorial optimization that improved upon classical methods and became a standard algorithm in operations research and computer science. He also made foundational contributions to shortest path algorithms, including average-case linear-time algorithms that improve upon Dijkstra’s algorithm.