Students

Lanran Fang. Lanran Fang is a Ph.D. student in Industrial & Enterprise Systems Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign (UIUC). His research interests lie in distributionally robust optimization (DRO), dynamic stochastic programming, and machine learning theory. His current theoretical work focuses on developing new data-driven DRO models that can effectively handle more complex and realistic data structures. Through this line of research, he aims to bridge rigorous optimization theory with modern data-driven decision-making under uncertainty.
Yuming Lu. Yuming Lu is an M.S. student in the Department of Industrial & Enterprise Systems Engineering at UIUC. His research focuses on developing robust and adaptive algorithms for sequential decision-making and large-scale learning systems with heterogeneous and noisy data. His work emphasizes both theoretical analysis and practical methodologies for reliable, uncertainty-aware machine learning and optimization.

Hyuk Park (2025). PhD thesis: “Data-Driven Robust Solution Schemes for Sequential Decision Making”
- Placement: Assistant Professor at Korea National Defense University
Xiangyi Fan (2023). PhD thesis: “Distributionally Robust Solution Schemes for Two-stage Optimization and Interdiction Problems Under Uncertainty”
- Placement: ExxonMobil
Yijie Wang (2023). PhD thesis: “Robust Solution Schemes for Queue Management, Fair Classification and Portfolio Selection”
- Placement: Assistant Professor at Tongji University
Prateek Srivastava (2021, jointly supervised with Dr. Purnamrita Sarkar). PhD thesis: “Robust Solution Schemes for Clustering and Decision-Making Problems under Uncertainty”
- Placement: Amazon
Areesh Mittal (2019). PhD thesis: “Copositive Programming Approaches for Robust Optimization and Löwner-John Ellipsoid Problems”
- Placement: Target
Madhushini Prasad (2018). PhD thesis: “Approximation Schemes for Network, Clustering, and Queueing Models”
- Placement: ExxonMobil