The 2019 Farkas Prize of the INFORMS Optimization Society is awarded to Katya Scheinberg, Professor, School of Operations Research and Information Engineering, Cornell University, for her many original and deep research contributions to nonlinear optimization.
Katya Scheinberg received her PhD in 1997 from Columbia University. Prior to joining the Cornell faculty in 2019, she held the Harvey E. Wagner Endowed Chair Professorship at the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Lehigh University.
Professor Scheinberg is a world leader in the field of derivative-free optimization and in the development of optimization algorithms for machine learning. She has made numerous theoretical contributions to convex optimization, semidefinite programming, random models in stochastic optimization, and interior-point methods. Her 2009 monograph, Introduction to Derivative Free Optimization, co-authored with Andy Conn and Luis Vicente, has become a widely-cited classic text. She is also a leader in the application of optimization to machine learning problems arising in practice.
Professor Scheinberg is currently Editor-in-Chief of Mathematics of Operations Research, and also serves as Co-Editor of Mathematical Programming A. Previous editorial appointments include Editor-in-Chief of the MOS-SIAM book series on Optimization, and Editor of Optima. She is one of the outstanding stars of the optimization community, and a truly deserving recipient of the 2019 Farkas Prize.
Selection Committee
Bill Cook (chair), Andy Philpott, Adrian Lewis, Kurt Anstreicher