Prof. Shachter joined Stanford's faculty directly after receiving his Ph.D. degree in Operations Research from UC, Berkeley in 1982. His doctoral dissertation developed a method for purchasing an expert's forecast that encourages accurate revelation of the expert's beliefs as probabilities. His interest in medical decision analysis led to joint work on scheduling patients for follow-up bladder cancer therapy.
Since then his research has focused on the representation, manipulation, and analysis of uncertainty and probabilistic reasoning in decision systems. As part of this work, he developed the DAVID influence diagram processing system for the Macintosh. He has worked closely with many students in Bioinformatics, where he holds a courtesy appointment. He has been active in the Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence, is a full member of INFORMS and its Decision Analysis Society.
