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Georgia Tech’s H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE) announced that Professor Alexander Shapiro has been appointed to the A. Russell Chandler III Professorship.

ISyE alumnus A. Russell Chandler III (BIE 67) established the endowment fund in order to enhance the ability of ISyE to attract and retain eminent teacher-scholars.

“Alexander has made substantial contributions to ISyE and to the fields of optimization and large scale, multi-stage stochastic programming,” said ISyE School Chair Edwin Romeijn. “His appointment to the A. Russell Chandler III professorship will give him the ability to enhance his research and many collaborations in these areas and further disseminate his findings, which have many applications, including unit commitment problems, inventory scheduling, and finance.”

Shapiro's research interests are focused on stochastic programming, risk analysis, simulation based optimization, nondifferentiable optimization and nonsmooth analysis, sensitivity analysis and optimization of queueing networks, sensitivity analysis of nonlinear programs, and multivariate statistical analysis.

Shapiro also has projects with other ISyE and Georgia Tech faculty. Together with Harold R. and Mary Anne Nash Early Career Professor and Assistant Professor Yao Xie and Ph.D. student Rui Zhang, he is working on a matrix completion problem of recovering low rank matrix from an incomplete set of observations. This research has many applications in signal processing and machine learning. And with the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering’s Professor Glaucio Paulin and Paulin’s Ph.D. student Xiaojia Shelly Zhang, he is developing algorithms for topology optimization subject to many load cases.

Shapiro has been on the editorial board of several professional journals, such as Mathematics of Operations Research, ESAIM: Control, Optimization and Calculus of Variations, and Computational Management Science. He was an area editor (optimization) of Operations Research and editor-in-chief of Mathematical Programming, Series A (2012-17), the flagship journal of the Mathematical Optimization Society.

He has given numerous invited keynote and plenary talks, including a 2010 invited section talk (Control Theory & Optimization) at the International Congress of Mathematicians, in Hyderabad, India. In 2013, he was awarded the INFORMS Khachiyan Prize for lifetime achievements in optimization. He received the 2018 Dantzig Prize from the Mathematical Optimization Society and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.

Shapiro earned an M.Sc. in mathematics from Moscow University in 1971 and a Ph.D. in applied mathematics-statistics from Israel’s Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in 1981.