Basic background information on yourself, perhaps where you came from, former education, etc.
I was born in Romania. Throughout middle school and high school, I was very passionate about math and physics, but also debate, public speaking, and foreign languages. As I was enrolled in a class with a special focus on computer science, and given the realities of Romania’s post-communist economy, I made the (rational) choice of a career in software engineering, and started college studying Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at the Politehnica University of Bucharest.
After the first two years, I decided to try my luck and apply as a transfer student in the US. I transferred to Yale University, where I completed my Bachelor’s degree in EECS, in 2004. My undergraduate thesis was on quantum computing; more precisely, quantum information and entanglement, which was a very young field at the time, on the interface of physics and computer science. But during my years at Yale, I also took quite a few courses in control theory and neural networks, and I was quite interested in AI. Thus, unsure of what I wanted to study for my Ph.D., I decided to head to Harvard for a Master’s degree in Engineering Sciences, with more coursework in control and optimization, and a good dose of computer science and physics.
While at Harvard, I finally found out about the discipline of Operations Research (OR), and the program with the same name, at MIT. It seemed like a perfect fit for my evolving (but converging…) interests, combining tools and theory from a diverse set of areas to solve practical problems, which was something I had really wanted to do more of. I thus applied for Ph.D. admission both in the ORC, as well as in EECS (Area 1). Having been accepted in both, I chose OR due to its emphasis on applications and real-world problems, and the amazing student body.
What degree you received from MIT and when?
Ph.D. in Operations Research, in 2010.
Who your advisor was at MIT?
I was co-advised by Dimitris Bertsimas and Pablo Parrilo.
What was the research you performed while at MIT?
My research at MIT was quite theoretical. I was primarily interested in dynamic robust optimization. Problems of this type are typically quite degenerate, in that they admit multiple solutions, many of which do not satisfy the well-known Bellman optimality principle. My research was aimed at understanding the implications of this degeneracy, by finding classes of problems where simple policies had provably optimal (or near-optimal) performance. I did this for several classical problems arising in supply chain and revenue management.
Where are you currently working?
I am currently an Associate Professor of Operations, Information and Technology at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business.
What have you been doing since your OR degree?
Immediately after graduation, I had a one-year fellowship at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, in Business Analytics and Mathematical Sciences; afterwards, I started my appointment at Stanford.
Advice/guidance to students coming to the ORC – why the ORC from your perspective?
As I already hinted, the ORC is a fairly unique place due to its combination of breadth and depth. An incoming student can engage with amazing faculty from a very wide set of disciplines, and conduct research on questions ranging from deeply theoretical to very applied ones. Another big plus is the student body — the ORC students are a very united group, and many of my fellow students have remained my friends to this day.
How did the ORC contribute to your development as a scientist and as a person?
As an ORC student, I had a significant degree of freedom to find my own path, which was particularly useful given my somewhat atypical background. I started with fairly theoretical questions and gradually moved to more applied ones, and I learned how to ask (and change…) questions, and how to collaborate on complex research projects. Perhaps more importantly though, it allowed me to establish a set of great friends, some of whom also became close research collaborators later in my career.
What is one memory about the ORC you carried with you?
The lunches at Rebecca’s Cafe and the Kendall food court (both now defunct…), and the coffee breaks at Starbucks, in the Marriott (which still seems to be around…)
