Management Science and Engineering

April 2024 Newsletter

Our lead story: Generosity in action

MS&E is fortunate to count among our community many distinguished academics who combine inspirational scholarship with service to the School of Engineering and to Stanford. Several senior faculty hold endowed professorships, which are made possible by some of Stanford Engineering's most generous friends. Endowed professorships are designed to ensure that remarkable scholars stay at the forefront of their respective fields and provide long-term financial stability to the university and the school. Today, we're pleased to share some news about two of MS&E's endowed professors.

Prof. Paté-Cornell spent the fall quarter engaged in her work as co-chair of the committee of the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) on risk analysis methods for nuclear war and nuclear terrorism. She published a public report on the methods of analysis of said risks, and presented that work to the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security, the White House, and other government agencies.

In MS&E, Prof. Paté-Cornell introduced students in her Engineering Risk Analysis course to new concepts in quantum computing with the participation of Michael Brett of Amazon Web Services. She also taught a graduate project course in which students addressed the existential risks of artificial intelligence, building on her published research on the need for encoding the right risk attitude in situations where an AI system makes risk management decisions under uncertainty. The course also studied the US's progress on the resilience of our supply chain of critical materials.

He developed a new generation of MP solver as a leader of the international team at Cardinal Operations—a startup co-founded by MS&E alums including Dongdong Ge (PhD '09). Named the COPT Solver, it has consistently ranked among the top two solvers globally and has influenced organizations in a variety of fields. Recently, an open-source solver co-developed by the same team became the first-ever to take advantage of GPU hardware, opening its capabilities to larger and more complex problems.

With PhD student Devansh Jalota, Prof. Ye studies online markets and equilibrium pricing. Their work goes beyond the simple supply-and-demand dynamics of a classical Fisher market, for example, to model how to allocate capacity-constrained public goods or the real-world behavior of users in an online marketplace.

Prof. Ye's influence extends outside Stanford as well. Haihao Lu, a professor of operations management at the Booth School of Business who worked on the GPU-based MP solver with Prof. Ye, builds on Prof. Ye's seminal contributions to the field of online linear programming. This work has influenced multiple sectors such as internet advertising. Additionally, Prof. Ye's work with Stanford alum Erick Delage (MS '05, PhD '09 Electrical Engineering) on how to minimize risk when there is no faith in a distribution model continues to be cited in research spanning diverse areas, including environmental policies, machine learning, and statistics.

EVENTS

MS&E CAREERS

John Sears (MS '15), center, led an informational session on campus about quantitative careers in sports  | Image by Patty Padilla

STORIES & VOICES

Left to right: Siegfried Hecker, Sheldon Ross, Chuck McCallum | Images courtesy of Stanford and INFORMS

On the shoulders of giants:  Join us as we celebrate the pioneers of MS&E through oral histories.

• Siegfried Hecker, professor emeritus of MS&E, describes his early life and education, his research in plutonium science and international nuclear security, and his career at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, including his service as its director from 1986 to 1997.
  
  
• Sheldon Ross (PhD '68) discusses his experience during the early days of operations research at Stanford, as well as other stories from his career.
  
  
• Chuck McCallum (PhD '70) shares his story, from being advised by professor emeritus of MS&E Richard Cottle to working at Bell Labs, and much more.

AWARDS & RECOGNITION

Faculty

• Arvind Karunakaran, with Hatim Rahman (PhD '19) and former MS&E postdoctoral scholar Tim Weiss, received multiple honors for studying the experimentation done by online platforms and its impact on users.
  
  
• Vasilis Syrgkanis received a Google Research Scholar award for his proposal named "Automating the Causal Machine Learning Pipeline."
  
  
• Melissa Valentine was named a 2024 Microsoft Research Global AI & Society Fellow.
  
  
• Pamela Hinds was named the next Rodney H. Adams Professor in the School of Engineering.

Alums & Students

• Jill Horing (PhD '23) was named a 2024 California Council on Science and Technology Policy Fellow.
  
  
• Grace Isford '19 (MS '19) was named a 2024 Forbes 30 Under 30 Entrepreneur in Venture Capital.
  
  
• Toby Gerhart '10 will be inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame.
  
  
• Mayfield Fellows alum Athena Chang was named a Schwarzman Scholar.
  
  
• Postdoctoral scholar Anna Lukkarinen received the Best Postdoc Presentation Award at Stanford’s Sustainability Data Science Conference.
  
  
• Senior Soren Jensen was named an All-Academic Scholar-Athlete for men's water polo.
  
  
• Senior Ky Robinson was named to the preseason watch list for The Bowerman, collegiate track and field's most prestigious individual honor.

Management Science and Engineering
Stanford School of Engineering
475 Via Ortega MC 4026
Stanford, California 94305
[email protected]

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