I am a professor at the School of Operations Research and Information Engineering at Cornell University. In July 2024 I will join the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology as a Coca-Cola Foundation Chair and Professor. Before Cornell I held the Harvey E. Wagner Endowed Chair Professor position at the Industrial and Systems Engineering Department at Lehigh University. I was also a co-director of Lehigh Institute on Data, Intelligent Systems and Computation.
My main research areas are related to developing practical algorithms (and their theoretical analysis) for various problems in continuous optimization, such as convex optimization, derivative free optimization, machine learning, quadratic programming, etc. I published a book in 2009 titled, Introduction to Derivative Free Optimization, which is co-authored with Andrew R. Conn and Luis N. Vicente. Lately some of my research focuses on the analysis of probabilistic methods and stochastic optimization with a variety of applications in machine learning and reinforcement learning. I have been focusing on large-scale optimization method for Big Data applications and Machine Learning since 2000. At Cornell and at Lehigh I taught a PhD level course on Optimization and Machine Learning and I co-founded Lehigh’s OPTML group and the TRIPODS Institute on Optimization and Learning at Lehigh.
I was born in Moscow, Russia, and earned my undergraduate degree in operations research from the Lomonosov Moscow State University in 1992 and then received my Ph.D. in operations research from Columbia University, IEOR Department in 1997. I was a Research Staff Member at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center for over a decade, where I worked on various applied and theoretical problems in optimization.
I am currently the the Editor-in-Chief of the Mathematics of Operations Research and a co-editor of Mathematical Programming. In the past I have served as an Editor-in-Chief of SIAM-MOS Series on Optimization and an associate editor of SIOPT, Mathematical Programming and SIMODS as well as the editor of Optima, the MOS newsletter.
From 2020 to 2022 I served as the chair of SIAM Activity Group on Optimization.
My awards include, Lagrange Prize in Continuous Optimization (together with Andrew R. Conn and Luis N. Vicente), Farkas Prize from Informs Optimization Society, the Outstanding Simulation Publication award from Informs Simulation Society (jointly with Jose Blanchet, Coralia Cartis and Matt Menickelly) and Informs Fellow.
My research is supported by grants from AFOSR, DARPA, NSF, ONR and Yahoo and Google.
Katya Scheinberg
Coca-Cola Foundation Chair and Professor
School of Industrial and Systems Engineering