Frank E. CurtisView profile
Professor
Frank E. Curtis is a Professor in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Lehigh University, where he has been since 2009. He holds a B.S. in Mathematics and Computer Science from the College of William and Mary (2003), an M.S. and Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering from Northwestern University (2004 and 2007), and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at New York University’s Courant Institute (2007–2009). His research focuses on developing numerical methods for large-scale nonlinear optimization, with applications in machine learning, operations research, and energy systems. Key achievements include the 2021 SIAM/MOS Lagrange Prize for Continuous Optimization (with Bottou and Nocedal) and the 2018 INFORMS Computing Society Prize (with Burke, Lewis, and Overton). He has secured significant funding from the NSF, DoE, and ONR, including a TRIPODS grant and ARPA-E awards. His work on the ARPA-E Grid Optimization Competition earned second place in 2020. Curtis’s research interests span mathematical optimization, numerical analysis, and algorithm design. His recent articles emphasize stochastic optimization, fairness in machine learning, and robust algorithm development for constrained systems. He serves as an Area Editor for Mathematics of Operations Research and Associate Editor for multiple top journals, including Mathematical Programming and SIAM Journal on Optimization . Notable grants include DoE ASCR Early Career Awards and NSF TRIPODS funding for collaborative projects with Northwestern, Boston University, and Cornell. His OptML @ Lehigh team develops cutting-edge optimization tools and frameworks for real-world applications.










