Tuo Zhao is an assistant professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering (ISyE) at Georgia Tech, one of several new faculty hires for the School in January 2017.

Zhao’s current research focuses on developing a new generation of optimization algorithms with statistical and computational guarantees, as well as user-friendly open source software for machine learning and scientific computing.

He received his Ph.D. in computer science at Johns Hopkins University (JHU) in 2016 before joining ISyE. He was a visiting student in the Department of Biostatistics at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health from 2011-2012, and the Department of Operations Research and Financial Engineering at Princeton University from 2014-2016.

Zhao has received several awards and scholarships for his work. He was the core member of the JHU team winning the INDI ADHD 200 global competition on fMRI imaging-based diagnosis classification in 2011. He received the Siebel scholarship in 2014, the Baidu Fellowship in 2015-2016, and a Chinese Government Scholarship for Outstanding Graduates Abroad in 2016. He was the co-recipient of the 2016 ASA Best Student Paper Award on Statistical Computing and the 2016 INFORMS SAS Best Paper Award on Data Mining.