Jose A. Soto

Jose A. Soto is an Associate Professor and Academic Chair of the Mathematical Engineering Department at the University of Chile. He is also an associated researcher at the Center for Mathematical Modeling. His research focuses on Combinatorics, Algorithms, and Combinatorial Optimization. Previously, he was a postdoc at TU-Berlin's Combinatorial Optimization & Graph Algorithms Group. He holds a PhD in Mathematics from MIT (2011) and an undergraduate degree in Mathematical Engineering from the University of Chile (2006).

He has led multiple grants, including Fondecyt Project 1181180 on approximation algorithms and Fondef IDeA ID18I10250 for VRP optimization. He has collaborated internationally, including with the Max Planck Institute on fast approximation algorithms for massive datasets.

His research spans topics like prophet inequalities, matroid secretary problems, and geometric optimization, with notable contributions in Mathematics of Operations Research, Journal of Machine Learning Research, and Algorithmica. He has advised numerous students and postdocs, including Krzysztof Fleszar and Kevin Schewior during the MPII-UChile collaboration.

Teaching includes courses on Approximation Algorithms, Combinatorial Optimization, and Calculability/Computational Complexity. He has organized conferences like IPCO 2013 and participated in program committees for WADS 2021 and LATIN 2018.