Three new faculty members to join IEMS this Fall

Three new faculty members will join IEMS this September!

Zhaoran Wang received his PhD in Operations Research and Financial Engineering from Princeton University. He joins IEMS after deferring for one year to work as a postdoctoral fellow with Tencent's Artificial Intelligence Lab. Zhaoran’s research is at the interface of statistics and optimization in machine learning. He has specific interests in understanding the tradeoff between statistical accuracy and computational effort as well as establishing provable guarantees for non-convex problems in statistical learning.

Chang-Han Rhee received his PhD from Stanford University in Computational & Mathematical Engineering. He subsequently worked as a postdoctoral fellow, first at Georgia Tech and then at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica in Amsterdam. Chang-Han’s research is in applied probability and simulation. He has developed unbiased estimators for stochastic differential equations and Markov Chain Monte Carlo, and analyzed large deviations in models with heavy-tailed distributions.

Simge Küçükyavuz received her PhD in Industrial Engineering & Operations Research from the University of California, Berkeley. She joins IEMS from her current position in Industrial & Systems Engineering at the University of Washington. Simge’s research is in discrete and stochastic optimization. She has technical expertise in polyhedral theory for integer programming, a strong eye towards computation, and recent applied work in social networks and humanitarian relief.