Ahmad Abdi

Ahmad Abdi is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mathematics at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). He joined LSE as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in 2018 and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2023. He holds a PhD in Mathematics from the University of Waterloo, supervised by Bertrand Guenin, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Carnegie Mellon University under Gérard Cornuéjols. His research focuses on Combinatorial Optimization, Integer and Linear Programming, Matroid Theory, and Graph Theory, particularly the study of Ideal Clutters and their applications to open conjectures like Woodall’s and the Generalized Berge-Fulkerson conjecture.

Education:

• PhD in Mathematics, University of Waterloo (2018)
• Postdoctoral Fellow, Carnegie Mellon University (2018–2019)

Research Interests:

• Combinatorial Optimization and its applications to conjectures in Graph Theory (e.g., Woodall’s conjecture)
• Ideal Clutters and their connections to Linear Programming
• Matroid Theory and structural graph properties

Grants:

• EPSRC New Investigator Award (2023–2026) for research on Woodall’s conjecture and the Generalized Berge-Fulkerson conjecture

Students and Postdocs:

• PhD Students: Ruilan Wang (since 2019), Mahsa Dalirrooyfard (since 2022)
• Postdoctoral Fellows: Meike Neuwohner (since 2024), Tamás Schwarz (since 2025)

Teaching:

• MA431 Spectral Graph Theory (2021/22)
• Combinatorial Optimization: Packing, Partitioning, and Covering (2023)

Workshops: Co-organized the Cargese Workshop on Combinatorial Optimization (2022, 2024) and ACO@CMU Workshop (2020).