Students

If you want to work on mathematical optimization, come and chat with me. I enjoy meeting with students, and I’ve even set aside a bit of time each week specifically reserved for students who I’m not officially advising. If you’ve got an interesting idea, we might discover something together by talking it over, extracting the interesting nuggets, and casting aside the irrelevant details.

But which ideas are interesting? Often we don’t know the full impact of an idea until some time has passed; until we’ve had a chance to see it in action in a computer program; or until we’ve had a chance to see the theoretical consequences, for example, the idea might motivate new optimization problems or lead to new optimization algorithms. At early stages of research, you probably won’t understand precisely why your ideas are interesting, but we can probably figure that out together.

Collaboration between us can lead to an official student-advisor relationship, but it doesn’t have to; we can keep it casual. And collaboration can take many forms, like releasing software together, writing a paper together, or just bouncing ideas off of each other. There’s no obligation for collaboration, but I find that my ideas often improve with close collaboration because in groups of two or more people, it’s easier to stay excited about research; I’m accountable to someone else if I don’t make progress; and I’m forced to leave my mental vacuum, where I spend countless hours toiling away on potentially unimportant stuff. Collaboration often propels ideas to completion at light speed.

So if you like my research and want to be advised or co-advised by me, just tell me; you don’t have to read through my papers before we meet; that’s never necessary, though students often think it is.

In fact, I’m always interested in working with people who have skills that complement my own, for example, great computing skills, a good theoretical facility with interesting ideas, or a broad knowledge of some application area (e.g., machine learning, health care, etc.).

It’s possible, though, that you have no idea what you want to do. But as long as you’re motivated, that’s not a problem. I can suggest potential projects for you to work on, and hopefully one will excite you. If none of them excite you, or if we can’t find some common ground, it’s probably best that we postpone our collaboration until something concrete arises that we’re both excited about.

And even then, nothing is lost; at the very least we’ll have had a nice chat.