Associate Professor George Lan has been appointed to an A. Russell Chandler III Professorship in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE), effective June 15, 2021. The A. Russell Chandler III Professorship was created to enhance the Stewart School’s ability to attract and retain eminent teacher-scholars to this position of academic leadership.

Lan’s research and teaching interests lie in theory, algorithms, and applications of stochastic optimization and nonlinear programming. Most of his current research concerns the design of efficient algorithms with strong theoretical performance guarantees and superior practical performance for solving challenging optimization problems. He is actively pursuing the application of stochastic and nonlinear optimization models in large-scale data analysis, including machine learning, image processing and simulation input/output analysis. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Office of Naval Research (ONR), Army Research Office, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

“I am deeply honored to receive the A. Russel Chandler Professorship, which will provide my students and me necessary financial support for various research and learning activities,” noted Lan. “Ultimately, it will help us push forward the frontier of a few relevant research directions. I am very grateful, on behalf of my research group, for the generous support of the A. Russell Chandler III faculty endowment fund.”

Lan’s academic honors include an NSF CAREER Award; first place in the INFORMS JFIG Paper Competition; finalist for the Mathematical Optimization Society Tucker Prize; second place for the INFORMS George Nicholson Prize; and first place in the INFORMS Computing Society Student Paper competition.

Lan received his Ph.D. from ISyE in 2009 and joined the School’s faculty in 2016. He is the associate director of machine learning and data science for the Machine Learning Center at Georgia Tech.