I was born and raised in France, and received a Bachelor and Master of Science in Applied Probability from École Polytechnique near Paris. During my five years as a PhD student at the Operations Research Center, I was co-advised by Dimitris Bertsimas (MIT Sloan) and Patrick Jaillet (MIT EECS).

I defended my thesis in June 2019, with the title “The edge of large-scale optimization in transportation and machine learning”. I primary looked into the massive optimization problems that underpin complex transportation systems. In particular, I was very fortunate to collaborate with Boston Public Schools to work on school transportation. We introduced novel school bus routing and school start time selection algorithms and were able to remove dozens of buses from Boston streets, save millions of dollars every year, and have a major policy impact. More broadly, my research mainly focused on in the scalability challenges of transportation applications, and the potential impact of algorithms in the real world.

My time in the ORC was both enriching and enjoyable. First and foremost, the ORC is a welcoming community, and this is particularly important when coming from a foreign country. I think this may be one of the main reasons why the ORC is one of the foremost programs in Operations Research. The ease of collaborations with other students and faculty and the constant support provided throughout this adventure really makes the ORC a unique environment. And on top of this, you have access to brilliant faculty as well as the vibrant MIT environment and its extraordinary facilities!
 
I spent five important years of my life in the ORC, and this time was positive enough to convince me to begin an academic career, an option I was not considering before. On the more personal side, I also think it allowed me to become a more caring person. Maybe this was because of my participation in a student support group, or many research interactions with the US public schools system and its many challenges.

I will remember many little things from my time in the ORC that made all the difference, for example the many ORC social gathering organized at my apartment! Moving forward, have happily accepted a position of assistant professor in the Managerial Economics, Decision Sciences & Operations Department, at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, starting in Fall 2020. In the mean time I will be in New York City a post-doctoral researcher at Lyft, a transportation company. I am very excited about these next steps, and definitely have to thank the ORC and my supportive advisors for making this possible.