ISyE boasts the largest, single-program concentration of faculty at any U.S. university with optimization as their primary area of research expertise. Optimization, the mathematically rigorous methodology for seeking a best action among a multitude of alternatives, is a key design and operational tool in numerous critical applications. These include energy, financial, health and manufacturing systems, social networks, and supply chains.

In addition to being exceptionally large, we also believe that our optimization faculty is one of the very best, anywhere. Employing any credible metric for assessing research quality, our optimization faculty has few, if any, peers. Virtually every major research-based honor and award associated with optimization has been won by at least one member of our optimization faculty. This includes the John Von Neumann Theory Prize, the Dantzig Prize, the Fulkerson Prize, the Khachiyan Prize, and the Beale-Orchard-Hayes Prize. In addition, members of our optimization group have routinely held high-level editorial posts with the most prestigious journals prominently identified with optimization including Mathematics of Operations Research, Mathematical Programming, Operations Research and SIAM Journal on Optimization.

Prominent Methodological Subject Areas

  • Integer and Combinatorial Optimization
  • Convex Optimization
  • Semi-definite Programming
  • Robust Optimization
  • Stochastic Programming
  • Graphs and Network Optimization

Our Research Spans

  • Fundamental Theory
  • Algorithms
  • Computations
  • Applications