Hearty congratulations to IEOR Alum Gonzalo Munoz (Ph.D., 2017) for winning the Young Researchers Prize, awarded by INFORMS Optimization Society.
Gonzalo's interests are broadly in Mixed-Integer Non-Linear Optimization, including both theoretical perspectives and implementation of efficient algorithms to address problems of this type. His other research interests include Combinatorial Optimization, Polynomial Optimization and applications of these methodologies to Mining and Energy.
The INFORMS Optimization Society Prize for Young Researchers is awarded annually at the INFORMS Annual Meeting to one or more young individuals for an outstanding paper in optimization that was recently published in a refereed journal. Gonzalo's paper (joint with F. Serrano) develops foundations for the use of cutting plane technology in nonconvex, quadratically constrained quadratic optimization problems, thus porting ideas from linear mixed-integer programming to nonconvex but continuous optimization. This requires highly nontrivial conceptual and technical challenges that must be surmounted; while the paper is of a theoretical nature, follow-up work has demonstrated the practical applicability of the ideas
