Frank E. Curtis is a Professor in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Lehigh University, where he has been employed since 2009. He received his Bachelor degree from the College of William and Mary in 2003 with a double major in Mathematics and Computer Science, received his Master degree in 2004 and Ph.D. in 2007 from the Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Science at Northwestern University, and spent two years as a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University from 2007 until 2009. His research focuses on the design, analysis, and implementation of numerical methods for solving large-scale nonlinear optimization problems. He received an Early Career Award from the Advanced Scientific Computing Research program of the U.S. Department of Energy, and has received funding from various programs of the U.S. National Science Foundation, including through a TRIPODS Institute grant awarded to him and his collaborators at Lehigh, Northwestern, and Boston University. He received, along with Leon Bottou (Facebook AI Research) and Jorge Nocedal (Northwestern), the 2021 SIAM/MOS Lagrange Prize in Continuous Optimization. He was awarded, with James V. Burke (U. of Washington), Adrian Lewis (Cornell), and Michael Overton (NYU), the 2018 INFORMS Computing Society Prize. He and team members Daniel Molzahn (Georgia Tech), Andreas Waechter (Northwestern), Ermin Wei (Northwestern), and Elizabeth Wong (UC San Diego) were awarded second place in the ARPA-E Grid Optimization Competition in 2020. He currently serves as an Associate Editor for Mathematical Programming, SIAM Journal on Optimization, Mathematics of Operations Research, IMA Journal of Numerical Analysis, and Mathematical Programming Computation. He served as the Vice Chair for Nonlinear Programming for the INFORMS Optimization Society from 2010 until 2012, and is currently very active in professional societies and groups related to mathematical optimization, including INFORMS, the Mathematics Optimization Society, and the SIAM Activity Group on Optimization.

Frank E. Curtis
Professor and PhD Program Director
frank.e.curtis@lehigh.edu
(610) 758-4879
Harold S. Mohler Laboratory
200 West Packer Avenue
Bethlehem, PA 18015
Room 475

Education

Ph.D., Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences, Northwestern University
M.S., Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences, Northwestern University
B.S., Mathematics and Computer Science (double major), College of William and Mary

Areas of Research

Mathematical Optimization, Machine Learning, Numerical Analysis, Analysis of Algorithms and Complexity, Computing and Algorithm Development