Simge Küçükyavuz
Biosketch
Simge Küçükyavuz is Chair and David A. and Karen Richards Sachs Professor in the Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences Department at Northwestern University. She is an expert in mixed-integer, large-scale, and stochastic optimization. Her methodologies have applications in complex computational problems across numerous domains, including social networks, computing and energy infrastructure, statistical learning, and logistics. Her research has been supported by multiple grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Office of Naval Research (ONR). She is an INFORMS Fellow, and the recipient of the NSF CAREER Award and the INFORMS Computing Society (ICS) Prize. She is the past chair of ICS, president of Association of Chairs of OR Departments (ACORD), and chair-elect of the INFORMS Optimization Society. She has served on the editorial boards of Mathematics of Operations Research, Mathematical Programming, Operations Research, SIAM Journal on Optimization, INFORMS Journal on Computing, and MOS-SIAM Optimization Book Series. She received her Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research from the University of California, Berkeley.
Recent News and Events
- Seminar speaker, Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, University of Houston, March 2026.
- Program Committee Co-chair: INFORMS Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA, 2026
- Invited speaker at Aussois Combinatorial Optimization Workshop, Aussois, France, January 2026.
- Area Editor for Design and Analysis of Algorithms-Discrete at INFORMS Journal on Computing.
- Our paper, An Asymptotically Optimal Coordinate Descent Algorithm for Learning Bayesian Networks from Gaussian Models, is published in Journal of Machine Learning Research.
- Seminar speaker, Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, University of Oklahoma, November 2025.
- Congratulations to Tong Xu for receiving the Nelson Best Paper Prize, 2026.
- President of Association of Chairs of Operations Research Departments, 2025-2026.
- Seminar speaker, Edward P. Fitts Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, North Carolina State University, October 2025.
- Beth and Del Kimbler Lecture, University of South Florida, October 2025.
- Chair-Elect of INFORMS Optimization Society, 2025-2026.
- Our paper, Polyhedral Analysis of Quadratic Optimization Problems with Stieltjes Matrices and Indicators, is published in Mathematical Programming.
- Invited speaker at International Conference on Continuous Optimization (ICCOPT), Los Angeles, CA, July 2025.
- Plenary speaker at Third Vienna Workshop on Computational Optimization 2025 (VWCO25), Vienna, Austria, June 2025.
- Our paper, Integer Programming for Learning Directed Acyclic Graphs from Non-identifiable Gaussian Models, is published in Biometrika.
- Our paper, A Parametric Approach for Solving Convex Quadratic Optimization with Indicators Over Trees, is published in Mathematical Programming.
- Keynote speaker, 5th IMA and OR Society Conference on Mathematics of Operational Research, Birmingham, U.K., April-May 2025.
- Plenary speaker, The 18th INFORMS Computing Society (ICS) Conference, Toronto, Canada, March 2025.
- Check out our research highlight in the INFORMS Computing Society Newsletter, February 2025.
- Congratulations to Kim Yu for receiving the Nemhauser Best Dissertation Prize, 2025.
Link to my department profile.
