The Institute is led by a director appointed by the USC Viterbi Dean of Engineering, Yannis C. Yortsos.  The current director is Associate Professor John Carlsson who is responsible for managing the day to day activities of the Institute and sets the strategic direction for the Institute. A proposal review committee evaluates all proposals and makes recommendations on the fundable projects to the Institute’s Director.  The inaugural Director of the Institute was Professor Maged Dessouky followed by Professor Yong Chen.

Dr. John Carlsson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Southern California.  He has been the Kellner Family Chair since 2017.  He received his Ph.D. degree from the Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineeering (ICME) at Stanford University in 2009 under Yinyu Ye and his A.B. in mathematics and music from Harvard College in 2005.  He works on algorithms for solving problems in continuous location theory, and more generally, optimization problems that have some kind of geographic element.  

Dr. Carlsson has received numerous awards including the Northrop Grumman Teaching Award 2019, Popular Science magazine’s Brilliant 10, “The man who re-routes the world using geometry” in 2016, and in 2019, the DARPA Young Faculty Award to name just a few.

A fun fact about Dr. Carlsson is that he used to be a keyboard player in the SF area.