Rahul Mazumder is the recipient of a 2018 Young Investigator Program (YIP) Award from the Office of Naval Research (ONR). Known as one of the oldest and most selective U.S. science and technology basic research programs, the ONR YIP funds early-career academic researchers (investigators) “whose scientific pursuits show outstanding promise for supporting the Department of Defense, while also promoting their professional development.”
The awards were announced last week. Mazumder is one of five MIT awardees among the 31 scientists chosen from a broad spectrum of technical fields, whose research was deemed to hold “strong promise across a wide range of naval-relevant science and technology areas,” “based on past performance, technical merit, potential for scientific breakthrough and long-term university commitment.”
Mazumder’s three-year project, entitled “Combinatorial Statistical Inference with Mathematical Optimization,” will create new methodology to address key inferential problems central to modern applied statistics and data science, using techniques in mathematical optimization. This new methodology could then be applied to a wide range of problems in support of the U.S. Navy and Department of Defense.