News

(October 2021). Congratulations to Dr. Dario Frascaria for successfully defending his PhD thesis “Dynamic traffic models with route and departure time choice”!

(March 2021+). This year, I am part of the Program Committee for ICALP (Track A), MFCS, SODA and IPCO.

(January 2021). Along with others in the Department of Mathematics at LSE, I will be organizing the (virtual) Highlights of Algorithms conference in June.

(December 2020). Congratulations to Dr. Madelon de Kemp for successfully defending her PhD thesis!

(June 2020). I am organizing the Hausdorff Trimester Program on Discrete Optimization along with Daniel Dadush, Jesper Nederlof, Laura Sanità and László Végh. It will take place in Autumn 2021.

About me

I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Mathematics at the London School of Economics and Political Science (here is my LSE profile). I am also affiliated with CWI in Amsterdam. I have been awarded a VIDI grant, a TOP grant, and a VENI grant (now completed) by the NWO (the Dutch Organization for Scientific Research).

I previously held a faculty position at the Department of Econometrics & Operations Research at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Before this, I spent three years an Applied Mathematics Instructor at MIT, under the mentorship of Michel Goemans. I was a PhD student in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at McGill University, in Montreal, Canada, advised by Bruce Shepherd and Adrian Vetta. My undergraduate education was at the University of Cape Town, South Africa.

I work primarily in combinatorial optimization, with excursions into game theory and probability. See the research and publications sections of this homepage for more.

Positions

  • present2021

    Associate Professor

    London School of Economics and Political Science

  • 20212019

    Assistant Professor

    London School of Economics and Political Science

  • 20192018

    Associate Professor

    Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam & CWI

  • 20182013

    Assistant Professor

    Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam & CWI

  • 20132010

    Instructor in Applied Mathematics

    MIT

Education

  • PhD 2010

    PhD in Applied Mathematics

    McGill University

  • MSc 2006

    Masters in Applied Mathematics

    McGill University

  • BSc (Hons) 2004

    Bachelors degree, majoring in Mathematics, Computer Science and Physics

    University of Cape Town

Grants

  • 2018 - 2025
    NWO VIDI grant - ``Usable algorithms for network optimization``
    A competitive grant awarded by the NWO (Dutch Science Foundation) to pursue fundamental research and start a group.
  • 2016
    NWO TOP grant
    Awarded by the NWO (Dutch Science Foundation), this grant funds a PhD position.
  • 2013 - 2016
    NWO VENI grant - ``Robustness and connectivity in network design``
    A competitive personal grant awarded by the NWO (Dutch Science Foundation) to pursue fundamental research.
  • 2011 - 2014
    NSF grant ``New Approaches to Fundamental Problems in Network Design``
    I was a co-PI of this grant, along with Michel Goemans and Rico Zenklusen.