Dr. Mehrdad Mahdavi

Biography

Mehrdad Mahdavi is the Hartz Family Associate Professor at Penn State University, where he leads the Machine Learning Optimization Lab and serves as the Director of the AI Hub and Associate Director of the Center for Artificial Intelligence Foundations in Engineered Systems (CAFÉ). He joined Penn State in 2018 after working as a Research Assistant Professor at the Toyota Technological Institute and as a member of the research staff at Voleon and Microsoft Research. His research focuses on fundamental problems in computational theoretical machine learning, encompassing a wide range of topics within machine learning optimization, including large-scale machine learning, statistical learning theory, convex and non-convex optimization, and deep learning applications. He has been recognized for his contributions with several prestigious awards, including the Outstanding Research Award from the Penn State Engineering Alumni Society in 2025 and the NSF CAREER Award in 2023. In his teaching, he aims to equip students with the necessary skills to understand and design new learning algorithms, offering courses such as CSE 580: Foundations of Deep Learning and CSE 588: Large-Scale Machine Learning: Mathematical Foundations and Applications.

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