Biography
I am a Senior Lecturer and ARC DECRA Fellow at the School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Melbourne. I am also an Associate Investigator for OPTIMA.
My research interests are broadly in nonlinear optimization, data science, and numerical analysis, with applications to areas such as imaging and climate science. I have particular interests in derivative-free optimization and bilevel optimization.
Details of my CV, publications, talks and software are available on this website (or look at Google Scholar and Github). For general optimization resources, see my nonlinear optimization resources page, or my introduction to interpolation-based (derivative-free) optimization.
Recent news
- (Dec-25) I will be speaking about linearly constrained direct search methods at the AustMS Annual Meeting at La Trobe University.
- (Nov-25) I will be speaking about linearly constrained direct search methods at WOMBAT 2025 at the University of Queensland.
- (Nov-25) New paper Bilevel Learning via Inexact Stochastic Gradient Descent with Mohammad Sadegh Salehi, Matthias Ehrhardt (University of Bath) and Subhadip Mukherjee (IIT Kharagpur). We analyze SGD with controllable errors in the stochastic gradient accuracy, applied to bilevel learning in imaging.
- (Oct-25) New paper Introduction to Interpolation-Based Optimization. This survey article provides an overview of derivative-free optimization (DFO) methods based on interpolation-type approximations (also called model-based DFO) aimed at new graduate students and interested researchers.
- (Sep-25) I will be talking about bilevel learning for imaging at the University of Melbourne Applied Mathematics.
- (Jul-25) Our paper Regularized black-box optimization algorithms for least-squares problems with Yanjun Liu (Princeton University) and Kevin Lam (University of Oxford) has been accepted to IMA Journal of Numerical Analysis.
- (Jul-25) I have started a new position as a Senior Lecturer in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Melbourne.
- (Apr-25) New paper Neutron beam shaping by ghost projection with Andrew Kingston and Alaleh Aminzadeh (ANU), Jeremy Brown (Swinburne University of Technology), Filomena Salvemini, Joseph Bevitt and Ulf Garbe (ANSTO), and David Paganin (Monash University) has been accepted by Physical Review A.
- (Apr-25) Our paper An adaptively inexact first-order method for bilevel optimization with application to hyperparameter learning with Mohammad Sadegh Salehi, Matthias Ehrhardt (University of Bath) and Subhadip Mukherjee (IIT Kharagpur) has been accepted to SIAM Journal on Mathematics of Data Science.
- (Mar-25) Our paper Bilevel Learning with Inexact Stochastic Gradients with Mohammad Sadegh Salehi, Matthias Ehrhardt (University of Bath) and Subhadip Mukherjee (IIT Kharagpur) has been accepted to SSVM 2025.