Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering (ISyE) Assistant Professor Alejandro Toriello has been awarded a prestigious CAREER grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). Selection for this award is based on two important criteria: 1) innovative research at the frontiers of science and technology that is relevant to the mission of NSF, and 2) community service demonstrated through scientific leadership, education, or community outreach.

The $500,000 award begins in mid-May 2016 and lasts for five years. Toriello’s project is titled “Towards Exact Methods for Dynamic Integer Programs.”

Decision support tools in industry and government must increasingly account for uncertainty, and the recent explosion in the amount of available data and the frequency of its generation imply that decision makers must constantly react to new information in a dynamic fashion. Using the NSF CAREER grant, Toriello will develop general-purpose solution techniques and algorithms for a widely applicable class of dynamic optimization models with discrete components. In addition, the project’s educational goals include a series of interactive lectures aimed at attracting and recruiting high school students to operations research and STEM more broadly, with a particular focus on students from historically under-represented groups.

“Alejandro is truly deserving of this award, and we are pleased that the NSF decided to recognize him for his achievements," said Edwin Romeijn, the H. Milton and Carolyn J. Stewart School Chair at ISyE. “He is a very accomplished young researcher, and his work is already having an impact on dynamic decision support tools used within industry and government.”

About ISyE Assistant Professor Alejandro Toriello

Toriello’s research interests lie in the theory and application of supply chain management, logistics and transportation, and in related optimization methodologies.

He received his Ph.D. in industrial engineering from Georgia Tech in 2010. Prior to joining ISyE, he served as an assistant professor in the Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Southern California.

He is a member of INFORMS and the Mathematical Optimization Society.