Post-Docs and Ph.D. Students

  Post-Docs

Tommaso Giovannelli is a postdoctoral researcher at Lehigh's Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering working with Luis Nunes Vicente since June 2020. Giovannelli received his Ph.D. in Operations Research in May 2021 from Sapienza University of Rome, where he obtained his BSc and MSc in Management Engineering in 2015 and 2017, respectively. From January 2020 to May 2021 he stayed at Lehigh ISE as a visiting scholar. Giovannelli's methodological research interests include nonlinear optimization, derivative-free optimization, and simulation-based optimization. His main application areas concern healthcare operations, machine learning, and transportation systems. He won a doctoral award from the EURO Working Group on Operational Research Applied to Health Services (ORAHS) of the International Federation of Operational Research Societies (IFORS) at the Doctoral Consortium ORAHS 2019, Karlsruhe, for his research proposal entitled A simulation-based optimization approach for the improvement of the emergency department management.   

Michael O'Neill  will join the Industrial and Systems Engineering Department at Lehigh University as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in September 2020. He is currently working with Frank E. Curtis and Daniel Robinson. O'Neill received his Ph.D. in Computer Sciences from University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2020 where he was advised by Stephen J. Wright. He obtained his bachelor's degree in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2014 and his M.S. in Computer Sciences at University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2016. He has received the CI Fellows 2020 postdoctoral research fellowship. O'Neill's research focuses on the design and analysis of nonconvex optimization algorithms, with a particular interest in optimization algorithms for large-scale machine learning problems.   

Gulcin Dinc Yalcin is a postdoctoral researcher at the Industrial and Systems Engineering Department, Lehigh University. She has received Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK) postdoctoral research fellowship. She is currently working with Frank E. Curtis since June, 2021. She received her M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering from Anadolu University, Turkey in 2012 and 2017, respectively. Her main research area is design and analysis of optimization algorithms for especially nonsmooth and nonconvex optimization problems. She is also interested in mixed integer and multiobjective optimization.   

Ka-Wa Yip is a postdoctoral researcher at the Industrial and Systems Engineering Department, Lehigh University. He is currently working in the Quantum Computing and Optimization Lab (QCOL) with Tamas Terlaky, Luis Zuluaga, and Xiu Yang. Ka-Wa received his Ph.D. in Physics and M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Southern California in May 2021. His Ph.D advisor is Daniel Lidar, a renowned expert in the field of quantum computation. Ka-Wa's Ph.D thesis is "Open-system modeling of quantum annealing: theory and applications". During the Ph.D. he did extensive research on quantum open systems, numerical methods for noise simulations, and quantum annealing. Ka-Wa's main research interests now include developing new quantum computing (QC) techniques to address combinatorial optimization problems with NISQ devices, new QC interior plant algorithms, and the study and control of noise in NISQ devices.