Lieven Vandenberghe

Lieven Vandenberghe is a Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) with joint appointments in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department and the Department of Mathematics. He received his PhD in Electrical Engineering from K.U. Leuven, Belgium, in 1992. Vandenberghe has held visiting professor positions at K.U. Leuven and the Technical University of Denmark, and his career at UCLA began in 1997 after postdoctoral work at K.U. Leuven and Stanford University.

His research focuses on optimization, systems and control, and signal processing. He co-authored the influential textbook Convex Optimization (2004) with Stephen Boyd and edited the Handbook of Semidefinite Programming (2000). His recent publications emphasize large-scale convex optimization algorithms, first-order methods, and applications to power systems and signal processing.

Key contributions span semidefinite programming, operator splitting, and chordal graph techniques for sparse optimization. He has supervised numerous PhD and MS students, including Xin Jiang (2022), Jinchao Li (2015), and Martin Skovgaard Andersen (2011). Vandenberghe also developed software tools like CVXOPT and CHOMPACK for convex and sparse matrix optimization.