Juan Pablo Vielma, PhD student at the Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE), was awarded the 2009 Herman Goldstine Postdoctoral Fellowship in Mathematical Sciences. While the Georgia Tech community of students and faculty are continually recognized for their academic excellence, Vielma's achievement particularly stands out due to its prestige.

The Herman Goldstine Fellowship provides scientists of outstanding ability an opportunity to advance their scholarship as resident members of the Mathematical Sciences Department at the IBM Thomas.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, NY. Recipients of this fellowship conduct research in pure and applied mathematics, as well as theoretical and exploratory computer science.

Vielma is the second student from the Stewart School of ISyE to receive this honor. His advisors are Drs. Shabbir Ahmed and George Nemhauser.

"Vielma has made some very significant contributions to problems that lie in the intersection of two difficult areas - discrete and nonlinear optimization. The Goldstine award is a strong testament to Vielma's talent and enormous research potential," said Ahmed.

Past and present activities of fellowship holders include work on sequential and parallel algorithms, cryptography, numerical analysis, differential equations, logic design, computer music, dynamic systems and approximation theory. The fellowship lasts for one to two years, and is awarded following a world-wide competition; the only restriction is that candidates must be within five years from their PhD.

Vielma joins the ranks of others in the Georgia Tech community honored with the Goldstine Fellowship. In fact, the past two winners have been associated with Tech:
2008- Ricardo Fukasawa, IE PhD 2008, for his work in integer programming.
2007- Ton Dieker, assistant professor at the Stewart School of ISyE, for his work on stochastic systems.

Vielma obtained his Bachelor in Mathematical Engineering and a Mathematical Engineering Professional Title from the Department of Mathematical Engineering at the University of Chile. His research interests at ISyE include theory and methodology for mixed integer programming and applications in finance and many areas of engineering.

Vielma's other notable achievements include winning the INFORMS Optimization Society Student Paper Prize, FOR the paper entitled "A Lifted Linear Programming Branch-and-Bound Algorithm for Mixed Integer Conic Quadratic Programs". In addition, Vielma has published his research in a variety of journals including: INFORMS Journal on Computing, Discrete Optimization, Operations Research Letters, and European Journal of Operational Research.