I was born in Switzerland but grew up in Auckland, New Zealand. I was drawn to Operations Research from early on, when my fantastic high-school math teacher, Johanna McHardy, wrote a problem on the board about how many ways New Zealand’s national rugby team could score 35 points, which turns out to be an integer programming problem. Being passionate about both math and its real-world applications, I studied Operations Research and Continuum Mechanics for my undergraduate degree at the University of Auckland. 

In my first semester at Auckland, I was incredibly fortunate to have Jack Dunn as one of my TAs, who had just been admitted to MIT ORC and was joining in the fall. This put the idea in my head that doing a PhD overseas at a world-class university was a realistic possibility. Accordingly, when in my final year at Auckland I discovered I really enjoyed research, I decided to apply to six PhD programs in the US. After visiting MIT ORC and seeing its vibrant student culture, I knew immediately that it was the right place for me to be.

During my five years as a PhD student at the Operations Research Center, I was advised by Dimitris Bertsimas, who taught me to always aspire to conduct impactful research that simultaneously improves our knowledge of mathematics and the human condition. My thesis was on obtaining provably optimal and usually fast algorithms for problems where solutions need to interpretable, so they can easily be explained to humans. In particular, new formulations and algorithms for problems with sparsity and rank constraints. I was also fortunate to be exposed to a broad range of exciting real-world applications, from helping a Canadian bank make better sense of their consumer data via analytics and machine learning, to helping a fertilizer manufacturer allocate over one billion dollars of their own money to optimally decarbonize, to being part of a 25-person team at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, that went from scratch to creating an analytics platform with tools for tracking, suppressing and fighting the virus in less than three months, that eventually helped with the roll-out of one of the COVID vaccines. 

While the faculty at MIT are world-class, I believe that the most compelling reason to join MIT ORC is the other students. From my first visit at the open house, to my first happy hour and September retreat in Maine, I immediately felt that the ORC was a welcoming and vibrant place which was ideal for conducting research. It’s very easy to feel welcome in an environment with kind and smart people who are always happy to have lunch or grab coffee together, and get you unstuck whenever you are stuck on a homework or research problem, or just go for a run along the Charles river together. To this day, I count some of my fellow ORC alumni among my closest friends; I’ve even been to some of their weddings. One of them was even a coauthor on 4/5 chapters of my thesis, and is currently my closest collaborator. Classmates from the past couple of years have also been placed at the likes of Harvard, Georgia Tech, London Business School, USC, NYU, UBC, CMU, and Oxford (as well as top tech and finance companies), which means that if you attend MIT you will likely have as rich and deep a network as if you attended every single OR conference for the past ten years, just from going to the weekly happy hour (although you should still go to conferences!). 

Boston is also a great and very livable city, with great running routes (like the Esplanade or Middlesex Fells), bike paths (like the Minuteman bike path and the Lower Neponset river trail), hikes (the White Mountains), ski fields (like Killington or Loon), breweries (like Lamplighter or Aeronaut), climbing gyms, and beaches nearby. This gives plenty of opportunities to unwind, or distract yourself from the research problem you’ve spent the past month thinking about. All in all, if I had to choose where to do my PhD again, I would definitely pick MIT ORC. 

I currently have a one-year postdoctoral fellowship at the IBM T J. Watson Research Center, after which I will join Imperial College Business School as an Assistant Professor of Analytics and Operations, with an affiliation with Imperial College London’s exciting new Imperial-X initiative in artificial intelligence. I will be continuing my research agenda on developing algorithms with optimality guarantees for problems with interpretability constraints, and helping facilitate decarbonization via a judicious use of optimization. I’ll also be teaching classes on the likes of machine learning, analytics and optimization to undergraduate, masters and PhD students. I’m very much looking forward to keeping in touch with the faculty and Alumni I got to know during my time at MIT as I grow into the next phase of my career, and reuniting with some of them once a year at the INFORMS annual meeting.