UC Berkeley IEOR professor and alum earn international prize for breakthroughs in optimization

UC Berkeley Professor Alper Atamturk and UC Berkeley alum Andrés Gómez have been awarded the 2025 INFORMS Computing Society Prize, an honor recognizing outstanding contributions at the intersection of computing with operations research. They share the award with their collaborator Shaoning Han.

The team is recognized for a sequence of five papers introducing new mathematical methods for solving mixed-integer quadratic optimization problems—models that help guide complex decisions in finance, machine learning, health care, and beyond. These problems are notoriously challenging because they combine yes-or-no decisions with nonlinear mathematical relationships.

By creating what the prize committee called a “convexification toolkit,” the researchers transformed these problems into forms that computers can solve more efficiently. Their work has enabled advances in machine learning, signal processing, computer vision, and risk modeling, enabling stronger approaches for real-world decision making.

Atamturk is the Earl J. Isaac Chair in the Science and Analysis of Decision Making, professor and former chair of UC Berkeley’s Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research. His research has shaped optimization theory and practice worldwide.

Gómez, who was a PhD student of Professor Atamturk at Berkeley, is now an associate professor at the University of Southern California. He continues to work at the intersection of mathematics, computing, and decision sciences.

The 2025 ICS Prize highlights both the global reach of innovations that originate at Berkeley and the lasting impact of its scholarship on the foundational methods driving modern computing and decision making.