Minda Zhao | Georgia Institute of Technology

About Me

I am a final-year Ph.D. student in the Operations Research program at Georgia Tech ISyE. I am fortunate to be advised by Prof. Xin Chen. I got an M.S. in Computational and Applied Mathematics from the University of Chicago, where I worked closely with Prof. Lek-Heng Lim. Before that, I obtained my B.S. in Information and Computing Science from Sun Yat-sen University.

Research Interests

Stochastic Programming, Nonconvex Optimization
Operations Models, Optimal Control, Reinforcement Learning

Preprints

A Simple Solution to Improving Human Supervision of Algorithms: Evidence from Smart Vending

Minda Zhao, Brian Rongqing Han, Xin Chen, Tao Zhu

Under Review at Manufacturing & Service Operations Management
Third Place, 2024 CSAMSE Practice Award
SSRN
Landscape of Policy Optimization for Finite Horizon MDPs with General State and Action

Xin Chen, Yifan Hu, Minda Zhao (alphabetic order)

Under Revision at Operations Research

arXiv

Publications

Stochastic Steffensen Method

Minda Zhao, Zehua Lai, Lek-Heng Lim

Computational Optimization and Applications, vol. 89, no. 1, pp. 1-32, 2024

PDF Page

Honors and Awards

Third Place, CSAMSE Practice Award, 2024
NCCR Automation Fellowship, 2024
Hansen Fellowship, 2021
First-class Scholarship, 2018

Services

Journal Reviewers

Session Chair

International Conference on Continuous Optimization (ICCOPT) 2025