Professor Nick Sahinidis joined the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE) on August 15, 2020 as the inaugural Gary C. Butler Family Chair. Prior to this appointment, he was a professor of chemical engineering and director of the Center for Advanced Process Decision-making at Carnegie Mellon University and a faculty member at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Throughout his career, Sahinidis has pioneered algorithms and developed widely used software for optimization and machine learning. His research won the INFORMS Computing Society Prize in 2004; the Beale-Orchard-Hays Prize from the Mathematical Programming Society in 2006; the Computing in Chemical Engineering Award in 2010; the Constantin Carathéodory Prize in 2015; and the National Award and Gold Medal from the Hellenic Operational Research Society in 2016. He is the editor-in-chief of Optimization and Engineering and a fellow of INFORMS and the American Institute of Chemical Engineers.

Sahinidis received a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from Carnegie Mellon University and a diploma in chemical engineering from Aristotle University.