Nikolaos Sahinidis

Nikolaos Sahinidis is the Gary C. Butler Family Chair and Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering and the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology. His research bridges computer science and operations research with applications across engineering and scientific domains, focusing on developing rigorous optimization methods for complex real-world problems.

Dr. Sahinidis's research spans global optimization of mixed-integer nonlinear programs, informatics problems in chemistry and biology, process and energy systems engineering, and chemical product design. His work integrates theoretical algorithm development with practical applications in medical diagnosis, protein structure analysis, and environmentally benign chemical design. He has made significant contributions to inverse imaging problems in X-ray crystallography, biochemical network design, and black-box optimization.

His recent publications demonstrate a clear trajectory toward integrating machine learning with traditional optimization approaches, particularly in derivative-free optimization, global optimization of nonconvex problems, and mixed-integer nonlinear programming. His work increasingly focuses on sustainable engineering applications, including rare earth element recovery, water network optimization, and perovskite solar cell design, reflecting a strong commitment to addressing contemporary engineering challenges.

• NSF CAREER award
• INFORMS Computing Society Prize
• Beale-Orchard-Hays Prize from the Mathematical Optimization Society
• Computing in Chemical Engineering Award
• Constantin Carathéodory Prize
• National Award and Gold Medal from the Hellenic Operational Research Society
• Member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering
• Fellow of AIChE
• Fellow of INFORMS

Dr. Sahinidis has secured substantial funding from the National Science Foundation, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and industry partners for his research. His group has developed several influential software tools including CMOS for protein structure alignment, GPU-BLAST for accelerated sequence alignment, R3 for protein side-chain conformation prediction, and SAS-Pro for protein structural alignment. The Sahinidis Optimization Group maintains active openings for graduate students and researchers nearly every year, fostering the next generation of optimization scientists.

The Sahinidis Optimization Group at Georgia Tech is a leading research center in mathematical optimization and its applications. The group maintains strong collaborations with researchers across multiple disciplines and institutions, including the Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute. Their work spans theoretical algorithm development to practical implementations in chemical engineering, bioinformatics, and materials science, with a consistent focus on developing rigorous, efficient methods for challenging optimization problems.