Anna Winnicki

 Bio:  I am a Ph.D. student at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in Electrical and Computer Engineering and Coordinated Science Laboratory, where I am very fortunate to be advised by Prof. R. Srikant. The focus of my research is reinforcement learning theory. I have also done work in electricity markets. Prior to that, I graduated with a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 2018.

I work to understand the theoretical limitations of empirically successful reinforcement learning techniques. I apply these techniques towards algorithms in related domains, providing efficient and convergent algorithms. I am a finalist in the 2023 INFORMS Applied Probability Society Best Student Paper Competition. I received the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Lieutenant General Thomas M. Rienzi Award in 2022 and 2020 as well as the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Grainger Power Engineering Award in 2020. I am also interested in applications of RL to real world problems: I am collaborating with Prof. Shie Mannor and his team at NVIDIA Research to implement our work in their applications.

I am on the 2023-2024 academic job market!