John Gunnar Carlsson, Ph.D., has joined the Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, at the Viterbi School of Engineering, University of Southern California.  Assistant Professor Carlsson is a specialist in geographic resource allocation, such as vehicle routing and scheduling, facility location, and backbone network design. He received a Ph.D. in computational mathematics from the Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering under Yinyu Ye at Stanford University and an A.B. in mathematics and music from Harvard College. 

“I work on algorithms for solving problems in continuous location theory, and more generally, optimization problems that have some kind of geographic element.” adds Carlsson.  “I am particularly interested in problems that involve dividing a piece of land into pieces in a useful way, such as designing service districts for vehicles or allocating natural resources”

In addition to his academic work, Carlsson has also worked with many industrial partners such as Boeing and the San Francisco 49ers, who recently moved into Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara.  Carlsson developed a fast algorithm for estimating waiting times for “in-seat delivery” at the new stadium, an innovative service in which a person seated inside the stadium places an order on their mobile phone, which is subsequently delivered to them within a short time.

Carlsson is the recipient of the 2013 INFORMS Computing Society Prize, the 2014 Air Force Young Investigator Prize, the 2012 DARPA Young Faculty Award, and the 2010 INFORMS Interactive Session Prize.  His research is supported by DARPA, the Office of Naval Research, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the National Science Foundation, and the Minnesota Department of Transportation,  and has appeared in Operations Research,  Scientific Reports, Transportation Science, the INFORMS Journal on Computing, and the ACM Transactions on Algorithms.

“We are pleased that we were able to recruit Professor Carlsson to our department,” remarked   Maged Dessouky, Professor and Director of the Daniel J. Epstein Institute at the Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering .  “He has quickly distinguished himself in the field and his research focus on developing models to provide fundamental insights in the design and management of transportation networks has the potential to significantly improve the understanding of such systems.”

Professor Carlsson can be reached at [email protected].