Katya Scheinberg

Katya Scheinberg
Born	Moscow, Russia
Occupation(s)	Applied mathematician, professor
Years active	1997–present
Known for	Continuous optimization, derivative-free optimization
Notable work	Introduction to Derivative Free Optimization

Katya Scheinberg is a Russian-American expert in applied mathematics, with a specialization in continuous optimization and derivative-free optimization. She holds a professorship within the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Education and career

Originally from Moscow, Scheinberg completed both her bachelor's and master's degrees in computational mathematics and cybernetics at Moscow State University in 1992. She then pursued doctoral studies in operations research at Columbia University, earning her Ph.D. in 1997. Her doctoral thesis, titled Issues Related to Interior Point Methods for Linear and Semidefinite Programming, was guided by advisor Donald Goldfarb.

From 1997 until 2009, she was part of the research staff at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center operated by IBM Research. Following this period, she held research appointments at Columbia University and served as adjunct faculty at New York University. In 2010, she joined Lehigh University, where she was appointed Wagner Professor in 2014. Later, in 2019, she accepted a professorship at Cornell University within the School of Operations Research and Information Engineering before transitioning to Georgia Tech in July 2024.

Since 2014, Scheinberg has been the editor-in-chief of the SIAM-MOS Book Series on Optimization. Additionally, she managed editorial responsibilities for Optima, the newsletter of the Mathematical Programming Society, between 2011 and 2013.

Research

Her investigative work centers on the nexus between optimization techniques and machine learning, with particular emphasis on kernel-based support vector machine models.

Together with Andrew R. Conn and Luís Nunes Vicente, she co-wrote Introduction to Derivative Free Optimization (published by SIAM Press in 2008).

Recognition

In recognition of their book's influence across fields such as aerospace engineering, urban transportation systems, adaptive meshing, and groundwater remediation, Scheinberg, Conn, and Vicente were awarded the Lagrange Prize in Continuous Optimization by the Mathematical Optimization Society and Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics in 2015. She received the Farkas Prize from INFORMS' Optimization Society in 2019 and was honored as an INFORMS Fellow in 2022 for her leadership and significant contributions to continuous and derivative-free optimization.