Yu Yang
Assistant Professor, Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISE), UF
Assistant Director, Center for Applied Optimization (CAO), UF
Office: 401C Weil Hall
Address: P.O. Box 116595, Gainesville, FL 32611
Email: yu.yang@ise.ufl.edu
Phone: (352) 294-7727
Welcome to My Personal Webpage!
I currently serve as an assistant professor in ISE and an assistant director of the CAO at UF. I obtained my Ph.D. in Operations Research, with a minor in Mathematics, from ISyE at Georgia Institute of Technology in 2020. During my stay at Georgia Tech, I had the privilege to work with Prof. Martin Savelsbergh (advisor), Prof. Natasia Boland (co-advisor), Prof. Alan Erera, and Prof. Guanghui (George) Lan. Before that, I earned my B.S. in Applied Mathematics in 2016 from the School of Mathematical Sciences at Peking University and conducted undergraduate research under the guidance of Prof. Zaiwen Wen and Prof. Bin Dong.
My research focuses on solving critical decision-making challenges in logistics, healthcare, sustainable energy, and public safety. By integrating combinatorial optimization, machine learning (ML), and artificial intelligence (AI), I develop innovative solutions that provide actionable insights for organizations facing complex, real-world problems, such as drone-aided delivery, radiotherapy in cancer treatment, and the design of large-scale inland wind farms. My work on novel modeling and ML-enhanced strategies for branching, variable reduction, and decomposition has led to breakthroughs in solving these problems optimally, as exemplified by RouteOpt, our open-source software achieving leading performance in optimizing vehicle routes for last-mile delivery. I am also interested in developing zeroth- and first-order methods with provable convergence rates to tackle large-scale, high-dimensional problems arising in modern AI/ML applications and business analytics. Collectively, these efforts promote strategic planning and operational efficiency across engineering and business domains.