Dr. Arjun Ramachandra

Dr. Arjun Ramachandra joined IIMB on 20 October as Assistant Professor in the Decision Sciences area. He holds the Young Faculty Research Chair. His research interests broadly lie in optimization under uncertainty at the interface of operations research, probability theory and computer science focusing on leveraging tools from these areas to efficiently solve or derive performance guarantees to complex optimization problems. Specific thrust areas with an interdisciplinary flavour include distributionally robust optimization, data-driven tail risk estimation, theory of negative dependence, correlation gap analysis with weak independence, approximation guarantees with submodularity and derandomization with small sample space constructions. His current research is aimed at analyzing challenging discrete optimization problems to develop novel insights into the behaviour of structured function classes under realistic notions of randomness. His work has found applications in areas such as bottleneck combinatorial optimization, data-driven portfolio optimization and project evaluation and review techniques (PERT) for managers.