Ph.D. Graduate Awarded Interdisciplinary Thesis Awards

Mehrdad Ghadiri, a recent Ph.D. graduate, was awarded the College of Computing’s Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award and Sigma Xi’s Best Ph.D. Thesis Award. 

Ghadiri was part of the Algorithms, Combinatorics, and Optimization (ACO) program, which he graduated from in the fall of 2023. His research interests include optimization, theoretical computer science, and applied mathematics. 

Ghadiri’s thesis focused on three different problems: creating efficient algorithms for tensor decompositions, socially fair outcomes in clustering algorithms, and the stability of numerical linear algebraic algorithms under finite precision.

Ghadiri said the awards have validated his interest in working on fundamental problems. 

“In particular, since the Sigma Xi dissertation award spans all disciplines at Georgia Tech, I am very happy that researchers and scientists from other areas of science have recognized my work and field of study as significant and valuable,” he said. 

Ghadiri is grateful for the support and opportunities from the School of Computer Science and credits Professor Santosh Vempala, his former advisor, with much of his success. 

"It was a pleasure and my good fortune to work with Mehrdad for the past several years --- he has both the vision and the talent to identify and make progress on broadly interesting and important algorithmic problems, as his thesis amply demonstrates. I look forward to many great discoveries by him in years to come,” Vempala said. 

Ghadiri is a postdoc at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology working on a broad range of optimization, machine learning, and statistics problems. He plans to continue his research on fundamental optimization and theoretical computer science problems to develop practical solutions for use in the real world.