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I am an Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a dual appointment in the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery and the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering. I am also affiliated, by courtesy, with the Departments of  Mathematics and Computer Sciences. I am a core member of both the Optimization group and the Data Science Hub.

Bio. I received my Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Padova in 2009, under the supervision of Giacomo Zambelli. After that, I worked as a postdoctoral researcher with Robert Weismantel, first at the Institute for Mathematical Optimization at Otto-von-Guericke University, and then at the Institute for Operations Research at ETH Zürich. In 2013, I joined the Mathematical Programming group at IBM Research as a Goldstine fellow. I moved to the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2014 and was granted tenure in 2020.

Research. My research interests lie in theoretical and algorithmic aspects of Mathematical Optimization and Discrete Mathematics, with a focus on Mixed Integer Optimization. The three main problems I consider are (1) Mixed Integer Linear Optimization, (2) Mixed Integer Quadratic Optimization, and (3) Binary Polynomial Optimization. A central question that is at the heart of my research is: Which structural restrictions on these general optimization problems allow us to solve them efficiently? I also work on Discrete Geometry, Polyhedral Combinatorics, and on optimization problems of relevance in Data Science and Machine Learning, like Sparse PCA, Subset Selection, and Clustering problems. 

My research has been funded by NSF, ONR, and AFOSR. I am an Associate Editor for Mathematical Programming and Discrete Optimization.

Awards. I received the 2023 Egon Balas Prize and the 2017 Young Researchers Prize from the INFORMS Optimization Society, and the 2023 INFORMS Computing Society Prize from the INFORMS Computing Society. In 2013, IBM Research selected me for the Herman Goldstine Memorial Postdoctoral Fellowship. I received the INdAM scholarship from the Istituto Nazionale di Alta Matematica from 2000 to 2004.

I am passionate about movies, videogames, and espresso. You can follow me on Letterboxd and Backloggd. A recent article about me by Tom Ziemer can be found here.