WiSE Gabilan Assistant Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering Phebe Vayanos (left), Chair of the Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering Maged Dessouky (center) and Assistant Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering Meisam Razaviyayn (right).
Assistant Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering Meisam Razaviyayn and WiSE Gabilan Assistant Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering have been recognized in the 2022 USC Viterbi Faculty and Staff Awards.
The awards, which were held on April 27 at USC’s Town and Gown in front of over 200 guests, are an annual event celebrating the school’s achievements over the past year and to recognizing the individual excellence of faculty and staff members.
Razaviyayn was presented with the Northrop Grumman Excellence in Teaching Award, while Vayanos was awarded the Junior Research Award.
Razaviyayn is an expert in the area of large-scale optimization, particularly when it comes to solving problems in uncertain environments. He designs and analyzes optimization and decision-making algorithms for modern data science applications.
Razaviyayn, who joined USC Viterbi in 2016, has recently received a number of high-profile honors for his research, most recently being awarded an NSF CAREER Award. In 2021, he was the recipient of 3M’s Non-Tenured Faculty Award, a competitive prize recognizing early-career faculty achievements in the areas of research, experience and academic leadership. He was also awarded a 2022 Young Investigator Grant by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. Razaviyayn is the associate director of the USC-Meta Center for Research and Education in AI and Learning.
Vayanos is the associate director of the USC CAIS Center for Artificial Intelligence in Society.
Her work aims to improve our critical systems that allocate scarce resources to satisfy basic needs — such as hospitals that provide treatments, social services that offer preventive care, or homeless services that provide shelter and housing.
Vayanos’ research is focused on optimization, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning; and in particular, on algorithmic fairness, interpretability and robustness. Her work investigates how tools in these areas can be harnessed to solve society’s most pressing problems and inform public policy.
Prior to joining USC, she was a lecturer in the Operations Research and Statistics Group at the MIT Sloan School of Management and a postdoctoral researcher at the MIT Operations Research Center. In 2021 Vayanos was awarded an NSF CAREER Award, while in 2020 she won an INFORMS Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Ambassador Program Award for her project to bring STEM education to high school students in underserved communities.
Vayanos holds a Ph.D. in operations research and a Master of Engineering in electrical and electronic engineering, both from Imperial College London.
For more about the 2022 Faculty and Staff awards, visit the USC Viterbi news site.
Published on May 12th, 2022
Last updated on May 12th, 2022
