Clifford Seth Stein (born December 14, 1965), a computer scientist, is a professor of industrial engineering and operations research at Columbia University in New York, NY, where he also holds an appointment in the Department of Computer Science.

Stein is chair of the Industrial Engineering and Operations Research Department at Columbia University.

Prior to joining Columbia, Stein was a professor at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire.

Stein has published many influential papers in the leading conferences and journals in his fields of research, and has occupied a variety of editorial positions including in the journals ACM Transactions on Algorithms, Mathematical Programming, Journal of Algorithms, SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics and Operations Research Letters.

[3][4] In recent years, Stein has built up close ties with the Norwegian research community which earned him an honorary doctorate from the University of Oslo (May 2010).