Dr. John D. Siirola
Principal Investigator, Sandia National Labs
John Siirola (SNL) is a Principal R&D Member of Technical Staff in the Discrete Math and Optimization Department within the Center for Computing Research at Sandia National Laboratories. His main areas of expertise are systems design, operations research, optimization modeling, and optimization algorithms. John’s research focuses on the intersection of computational tools with systems design and analysis; in particular, developing approaches for modeling highly structured systems, optimization algorithms that can exploit the expressed structure, and the application of these techniques to national security problems. Much of John’s research is disseminated through open-source software projects. He is the Sandia PI for the Institute for the Design of Advanced Energy Systems (process modeling, design, and optimization) and serves on the Pyomo Management Committee (optimization modeling). Previously he led the Acro project (optimization algorithms) and contributed to the Water Security Toolkit (modeling and analysis tools for drinking water distribution systems), Dakota (optimization and uncertainty quantification), Utilib, PyUtilib, gcovr, and cxxtest. John has a B.S. from Purdue University (2000) and Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University (2005), both in Chemical Engineering. He is a senior member of the AIChE, member of INFORMS, and member of the COIN-OR Foundation. John currently serves on the COIN-OR Technical Leadership Council and co-chaired the 2014 Foundations of Computer Aided Process Design (FOCAPD) conference.