Negar Soheili Received Research Excellence Award
Negar Soheili Received Research Excellence Award
Negar Soheili, Associate Professor of Business Analytics in the Department of Information and Decision Sciences at the UIC College of Business Administration, was recognized with the Research Excellence Award during the UIC Business Fall 2026 Faculty Meeting.
With a PhD in Operations Research from Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business, Soheili’s research focuses on developing optimization and machine learning methods to solve large-scale decision problems involving uncertainty. Her work explores how mathematical models and algorithms can be redesigned to take advantage of advances in computing and machine learning.
For Soheili, these challenges appear across business, healthcare, and operations. Clinicians may need to adjust treatment plans as patient conditions change, hospitals must allocate ICU beds without knowing future demand, and retailers must make inventory decisions without knowing exactly what customers will need. Similar challenges arise in finance, marketing, logistics, supply chains, and energy systems.
In one recent project, Soheili and her collaborators took a different approach to these computational challenges. Rather than simply developing faster algorithms for a standard mathematical formulation, they redesigned the formulation itself so that computational work could be divided into smaller pieces and performed simultaneously across multiple processors. They then developed optimization algorithms specifically for this structure, allowing them to solve substantially larger problems.
Beyond this work, Soheili studies the intersection of optimization and machine learning, including how learning can help identify useful structures or approximate computationally expensive parts of optimization problems. Her research also examines the theoretical foundations of these methods, including when they work and what performance guarantees can be established.
Negar Soheili thanks for Excellence Award
Receiving the Research Excellence Award was a wonderful honor. I am thankful to the selection committee for this recognition, and to the collaborators who supported my vision throughout these projects.
Negar Soheili Outside of the Classroom
Outside the classroom and research lab, Soheili spends most of her time with her family. She enjoys traveling, getting outdoors, and exploring new places with her husband and two young children.