Dr. Oktay Günlük

Biography

Oktay Günlük is the Gary C. Butler Family Professor at the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech. He started his academic career in 2020 as a professor of practice at Cornell University, within the School of Operations Research and Information Engineering. Prior to that, he served as the manager of the Mathematical Optimization Algorithms group at IBM Research and had an extensive tenure as a researcher in the Operations Research group at AT&T Labs. Besides fundamental research in mathematical optimization, he has worked on large-scale applied optimization projects for both internal and external clients. His primary research interests lie in the theoretical and computational aspects of discrete optimization problems, particularly in the realm of integer programming. Recently, his work has shifted focus toward developing integer programming-based methods for classification and clustering problems in machine learning. He holds a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree from Boğaziçi University in Turkey, as well as a Ph.D. from Columbia University.

Research Interests