Georgia Tech’s H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE) announced that Assistant Professor Swati Gupta has been appointed to a Fouts Family Early Career Professorship for a three-year term. Endowed by ISyE alumnus J. Louis Fouts (BIE 90), the Fouts Family Faculty Fund is designed to enhance the ability of ISyE to attract and retain eminent teacher-scholars.

Gupta's research interests lie primarily in combinatorial optimization, machine learning and algorithmic fairness. Her work focuses on speeding up fundamental bottlenecks that arise in learning problems due to the combinatorial nature of the decisions, drawing from machine learning to improve traditional optimization methods, as well as ensuring that developed algorithms are fair and ethical so they do not exacerbate inequalities present in the society.

She is a faculty member associated with the Center for Machine Learning at Georgia Tech and studies what she calls “socially conscious problem solving.” This includes research into algorithmic biases, particularly in job applications and school applications. Gupta is also the Georgia Tech principal investigator on an inter-agency team that has been awarded a $9.2 million grant from DARPA to study quantum computing. She is looking forward to examining how quantum computing may be able to help solve classical optimization problems.

“I am honored to be selected for the Fouts Family Early Career Professorship," said Gupta. "I am really excited about this position and am confident that this will help supplement our efforts to develop efficient algorithms by bridging discrete and continuous optimization; create opportunities for a much-needed and timely interdisciplinary collaboration across operations research and law; and result in greater direct impact of operations research in societal applications.”

Gupta earned her Ph.D. in 2017 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Before joining ISyE, she spent two semesters as a research fellow at the Simons Institute, University of California, Berkeley.