Georgia Tech’s Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE) announced that Assistant Professor Andy Sun has been appointed to the Anderson-Interface Early Career Professorship.

The Anderson-Interface Early Career Professorship was created to support an eminent teacher-scholar in a position of academic leadership in the field of renewable energy, sustainability, and natural systems.

“Andy has made valuable contributions both to the Stewart School and to his field through his research on optimization and stochastic modeling, particularly with applications in electric energy systems and electricity markets,” said H. Milton and Carolyn J. Stewart School Chair and Professor Edwin Romeijn. “His appointment to the Anderson-Interface Early Career Professorship will enable him to advance his career and further his work in this field.”

In addition to his research in optimization and stochastic modeling, Sun also works on theory and algorithms for robust and stochastic optimization, and large-scale nonconvex optimization.

“It is a great honor to be appointed to the Anderson-Interface Early Career Professorship,” said Sun. “ISyE has a long tradition of bringing cutting-edge operations research methodology to solving complex engineering problems.

“Specifically for my research, I – with my collaborators and students – have been working on modernizing the operation systems of electric energy systems, particularly in terms of developing new optimization methods, stochastic modeling approaches, and algorithms for electric power systems operations; maintenance; renewable integration; improving system stability; and utilizing demand response resources.”

“The Anderson-Interface professorship is both a recognition of this body of work and also an encouragement for me to press forward,” Sun added.

Sun's doctoral thesis won the second prize of the 2011 INFORMS George B. Dantzig Award, given for the best dissertation in any area of operations research and the management sciences that is innovative and relevant to practice. His paper, “Adaptive Robust Optimization for Security-Constrained Unit Commitment Problem” has been highly cited and helped form a new area of research of optimization under uncertainty in electric power system. Sun’s research has also won several paper awards, among which, “Multistage Adaptive Robust Optimization for the Unit Commitment Problem” won the first prize of the 2017 INFORMS Energy, Natural Resources, and Environment Section Best Paper in Energy Award. “An Adaptive Optimization-based Load Shedding Scheme in Microgrids” received the Best Paper Award at the 51st Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences in 2018. He has had numerous papers published in flagship journals in both power systems and operations research, such as IEEE Transactions on Power Systems, Operations Research, and Mathematical Programming. Most recently, Sun was awarded a CAREER grant from the National Science Foundation for “Data-driven Dynamic Adaptive Optimization for Next Generation Power System Operation.”

In 2011, he received a Ph.D. in operations research from the Operations Research Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a bachelor's degree in electronic engineering from Tsinghua University. Before joining the Stewart School, Sun spent a year as a postdoctoral researcher at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center.