Bio: Zhaosong Lu is a Professor in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Minnesota. He received his PhD from the Georgia Institute of Technology, advised by Renato Monteiro and Arkadi Nemirovski. His research covers theoretical foundations and algorithms for hierarchical, distributed, robust, and stochastic optimization, along with work at the intersection of optimization and statistics for data science and AI/machine learning, with interests spanning continuous optimization, machine learning, and computational statistics.