This Fall, ORFE graduate students Bachir El Khadir and Cong Ma received the SEAS Award for Excellence. Given to advanced graduate students who performed at the highest level as scholars and researchers, this award highlights their commitment to excellence. Bachir, advised by ORFE Professor Amir Ali Ahmadi, is "broadly interested in the interplay between algebraic optimization techniques and their application to dynamical systems. He is also interested in bringing tools from dynamical systems to learning theory, optimization and robotics.”

Cong, co-advised by ORFE Professor Jianqing Fan, focuses his research on developing provably efficient estimation and inference methods for extracting “actionable” knowledge from large-scale and high-dimensional data.