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The expert has been a faculty member in the field of Industrial and Systems Engineering since 2000. His dissertation won university and national competitions in the Industrial Engineering field, and he has remained an active researcher in the field. Currently, the expert sits on six editorial boards, has numerous publications, and has been awarded several grants for research in the area of combinatorial optimization and decision making. He has also worked with several company projects as a part of an outreach engineering management program with his university. As an academic, the expert has also been recognized several times for teaching effectiveness.

The expert has contributed novel research in top journals on the topic of integer linear programming, and has used this technique to solve problems in real-world application areas. Some applications that the expert has addressed in his research using integer programming include air transportation, production, logistics, military organization, radiation treatment, radar deployment and operations, sports league scheduling, and so on. Integer programming theory draws from linear programming theory; the expert regularly teaches in all of these areas.

The expert focuses on computational optimization; particularly on difficult optimization problems for which traditional approaches cannot provide solutions within reasonable computational limits. For instance, a recent study by the expert tackled a problem in radiation therapy treatment for cancer patients that previously could not be solved within days of computational time. The new algorithm provided by the expert and his colleagues was able to solve most practical instances within 30 minutes, without using increased computer power. This study is an example of the computational optimization field in general, and of the expert's research program.

The expert has focused on many large-scale optimization projects, including those that consider uncertainty in data and future events. Some such applications involve a game played between two agents, where one agent is trying to optimally destroy another agent's infrastructure. Anticipating the attacking agent's moves, the defending agent may wish to fortify his infrastructure before the attacker acts. Each of these types of problems requires the application of decomposition strategies. The expert has authored recent theoretical developments that allow for the solution of integer programs by decomposition that could not previously have been addressed.

Design problems, including airspace organization and network design, comprise a large portion of the expert's research program. In particular, the expert has been a research leader in interdiction and survivability problems, in which one designs a network to withstand intelligent attacks and/or accidental damage at minimum cost.

As a part of the expert's combinatorial optimization research program, dynamic programming is often employed. In particular, the expert has used dynamic programming to quickly solve problems that could not be solved by integer programming techniques in an acceptable amount of time. One such problem occurs on tree networks, where one could envision sensors that could monitor neighboring nodes except for the one on which they were located. Even if sensors have different installation costs at nodes, and different monitoring radii, the expert showed that the problem could be solved quickly using dynamic programming (but not by a traditional integer programming approach). A similar result, using a more complex dynamic program, was shown for a computer security problem in which sentries are deployed on network nodes to limit the severity of Distributed Denial of Service attacks.

The expert has derived mathematical optimization models for problems including air transportation, production, logistics, military organization, network security, radiation treatment, radar pulse interleaving, sports league scheduling, and so on. In addition, the expert has also worked with local industry on several collaborative projects with students, ranging from radar tracking management to bus routing to employee load balancing. Each of these applications involves stating a formal mathematical description of the problem, and then investigating methods by which the systems can be optimized.

The expert has worked in quadratic and non-convex optimization theory, with one focused project on the design of computer chips, and another on the design of reliable routing schemes. The theme of the expert's research and resulting algorithms lies in a unification of optimization techniques in the integer and nonlinear programming fields.

The expert has conducted numerous studies in large-scale network optimization problems, and interdiction studies in network design. The techniques used for such problems overlap the areas of linear, integer, and dynamic programming, and utilize computational optimization theory. Applications of network flow and design studied by the expert arise in transportation and logistics, telecommunications, manufacturing, and military fields, for instance.