Lehigh ISE is extremely proud to welcome Dr. Andrew V. Goldberg, a highly accomplished and internationally recognized operations research and algorithm scientist, as endowed chair Full Professor starting July 1, 2025. This is the first of the 3 endowed chairs of the department’s endowment to be filled.
Over his distinguished career, Dr. Goldberg has held research positions at leading institutions, including Stanford University, Microsoft Research, and Amazon. He earned a PhD in Computer Science from MIT, where he also obtained a BS in Mathematics, and later received an MS in Computer Science from UC Berkeley. His list of research accomplishments, industry innovations, and accolades is truly impressive. His citation count on Google Scholar exceeds 26,000, with an h-index of 74. In addition to his academic publications, he is the (co-)inventor of 17 patents.
Goldberg’s research includes several fundamental contributions, particularly in network flow and shortest path problems. He co-developed the push-relabel algorithm, a highly efficient method for solving the maximum flow problem in network optimization. This approach optimizes flow distribution and has become a cornerstone in operations research, computational science, and real-world applications such as transportation and network routing. Additionally, his average-case linear-time algorithm for solving the single-source shortest path problem in graphs with nonnegative edge weights is considered a classic, improving upon the celebrated Dijkstra's algorithm, which is taught in undergraduate ISE courses. Many of his algorithms are widely used in both industry and academia and are integral to basic and advanced courses in operations research, graph theory, and computer science.
Early in his career, Andrew Goldberg received an NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award (1988) and an ONR Young Investigator Award (1991), and his Ph.D. thesis was honored with the prestigious 1988 Mathematical Optimization Society A.W. Tucker Prize. Later, he was awarded the 2011 Farkas Prize by the INFORMS Optimization Society, recognizing outstanding contributions to optimization research. Two of his papers received the European Symposium on Algorithms Test of Time awards. He is also a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM, Class of 2009) and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM, Class of 2013).
Andrew is a rare scientist who excels in both the theoretical and practical aspects of algorithm design, ensuring their seamless application to complex operations research challenges. He brings to Lehigh ISE extensive industrial research experience while maintaining deep academic ties worldwide. Lehigh ISE is poised to lead in optimization algorithms for navigation systems under his expertise.
Andrew says: “Optimization algorithms play an important role in industry and affect our everyday life. As applications grow and get more sophisticated, we need more efficient algorithms. I am excited to join the ISE department at Lehigh as this gives me an opportunity to build a quality program in theory and engineering of algorithms that will produce solutions the world needs.”
