Industrial Engineering Adds Four Tenure-Track Assistant Professors

The Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences (IEMS) at Northwestern Engineering has announced four new faculty hires that will begin in 2023 and 2024. The tenure-track assistant professors add diverse backgrounds and experiences to provide more perspectives to IEMS students.

Julia Gaudio

Formerly a research assistant professor and McCarter Fellow in IEMS, Gaudio joined as a tenure-track assistant professor in June 2023. After earning a bachelor of science and master of science in applied mathematics at Brown University, Gaudio obtained a PhD from MIT in operations research. Her work focuses on modern discrete probability with an emphasis on network inference and network reconstruction problems, an interdisciplinary field involving researchers in computer science, operations research, statistics, applied mathematics, and statistical physics. Gaudio’s research involves uncovering hidden communities in networks, where the networks can be social, biological, or physical. While serving as a McCarter Fellow, Gaudio received two grants from the National Science Foundation.

Isaac Grosof 

Grosof is joining IEMS as a tenure-track assistant professor in fall 2024 after working as a postdoctoral fellow at the Georgia Institute of Technology and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign during the 2023-2024 academic year. They earned their PhD in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University, and received a bachelor of science and master of engineering in computer science from MIT. Grosof’s research is in applied probability and stochastic systems with applications to modern computer systems, in which jobs contend for resources such as processors and memory. Scheduling such jobs is key to improving system performance, and Grosof’s mathematical models bridge computer science and operations research. Grosof received the prestigious INFORMS George Nicholson Student Paper Prize.

Yiping Lu 

Lu is joining IEMS as a tenure-track assistant professor in fall 2024 after working as a postdoc at New York University’s Courant Institute during the 2023-2024 academic year. Lu earned a PhD in computational and mathematical engineering from Stanford University, and prior to that, he received a bachelor of science from the School of Mathematical Science at Peking University. Lu’s research is in applied probability, Monte Carlo simulation, and machine learning, often set in the context of physics-based systems governed by partial differential equations. His work fits in the growing area of artificial intelligence in science. Most deep learning models ignore fundamental physical laws, but when such laws apply, appropriately constraining a statistical machine learning model is key to inference of high quality.

Sean Sinclair 

Sinclair, who earned a PhD in operations research and information engineering at Cornell University, will join IEMS as a tenure-track assistant professor in fall 2024 after working as a postdoc at MIT. Sinclair received a bachelor of science in mathematics and computer science from McGill University. His research focuses on developing models and algorithms in reinforcement learning for sequential decision making under uncertainty with an emphasis on social good. Sinclair’s interests include multi-criteria decision making, emphasizing criteria such as fairness, cost, risk, and efficiency. An application of his work has involved optimizing operations for a mobile food pantry. Prior to earning his PhD, Sinclair served in the Peace Corps, teaching English, mathematics, and science to junior high students in Ghana.