Sean Sinclair

Sean Sinclair is an Assistant Professor at Northwestern University's Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences department. Previously, he was a postdoctoral associate at MIT under Devavrat Shah and Ali Jadbabaie, and completed his PhD at Cornell University under Christina Lee Yu and Siddhartha Banerjee. His research bridges reinforcement learning with operations management, focusing on data-driven sequential decision-making, fairness in algorithms, and resource allocation. He emphasizes empirical analysis through open-source tools.

Education: Ph.D. and M.S. in Operations Research and Information Engineering from Cornell University, B.Sc. in Honours Mathematics and Computer Science from McGill University. Pre-PhD, he served in the Peace Corps in Ghana and worked as a financial analyst at National Life.

Research interests include instance-specific reinforcement learning guarantees, Pareto-optimal fair resource allocation, and data-efficient algorithms for cloud computing. Notable awards include finalist status for the George Dantzig Dissertation Award and INFORMS DEI Best Student Paper. He actively mentors PhD students and collaborates on open-source projects like ORSuite.

Labs/Teams: Leads research in data-driven decision processes, fair allocation mechanisms, and algorithmic operations management at Northwestern.