Faculty Spotlight: Sebastian Pokutta Announced as David M. McKenney Family Assistant Professor

Sebastian Pokutta has been appointed David M. McKenney Family Assistant Professor, as announced by Georgia Tech’s Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering (ISyE), effective March 15, 2016.

“Sebastian was selected for this professorship because of his exceptional record of scholarship and leadership in the areas of optimization, big data analytics, and machine learning,” said ISyE School Chair and Professor Edwin Romeijn.

Pokutta, who is also the director of the Interactive Optimization and Learning Lab, has research concentrations on combinatorial optimization and polyhedral combinatorics, and in particular focuses on cutting-plane methods and extended formulations. His industry research interests are in optimization and machine learning in the context of analytics with a focus on real-world applications, both in established industries as well as in emerging technologies. Application areas include but are not limited to supply chain management, finance, cyber-physical systems, and predictive analytics. To date, Pokutta has successfully deployed analytics methodology in 20-plus real-world projects.

Subsequent to his graduate studies, Pokutta worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the MIT Operations Research Center where the topic of his research was combinatorial optimization and cutting plane procedures. Upon completion of his postdoctoral fellowship at MIT, Pokutta was appointed as an optimization specialist at ILOG where he worked on production planning and supply chain optimization within the steel industry, automotive industry, and energy industry. In early 2008, he joined KDB Krall Demmel Baumgarten in order to set up a quantitative, state-of-the art risk management practice and develop risk management methodologies at top tier banks. He then returned to academia and held the position of a research scientist at the Technische Universität Darmstadt and was visiting lecturer at MIT. Prior to joining Georgia Tech, Pokutta worked as a professor at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg.

Pokutta received his master's degree in 2003 and his Ph.D. in 2005 in mathematics, both from the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany.