David Edward Goldberg is an American computer scientist, civil engineer, and professor at the department of Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is most noted for his seminal works in the field of genetic algorithms. He is the director of Illinois genetic algorithms laboratory and also the chief scientist of Nextumi Inc. He is also the author of "Genetic Algorithms for Search, Optimization, and Machine Learning", which is one of the most cited books in computer science. David E. Goldberg received a PhD degree in civil engineering in 1983 from University of Michigan and his advisors were E. Benjamin Wylie and John Henry Holland. He is one of the most connected scientists in the evolutionary computation field, having collaborated, among others, with Kalyanmoy Deb and Jeff Horn. In 2003 David Goldberg was appointed as the first holder of Jerry S. Dobrovolny Professorship in Entrepreneurial Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. 

January 1st, 1953 in (Age 71)