Two tenure-track faculty join CMOR

Shiqian Ma and Sebastian Perez-Salazar, along with instructor Bo Jones, started at Rice on July 1.

Headshots of Shiqian Ma and Sebastian Perez-Salazar

Three new faculty members — including two tenure-track — have joined the Department of Computational Applied Mathematics and Operations Research at Rice University All started July 1.

They are:

Shiqian Ma, associate professor of computational applied mathematics and operations research (CMOR): He earned his M.S. from the Institute of Computational Mathematics and Scientific/Engineering Computing, Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2006, and his Ph.D. in industrial engineering and operations research from Columbia University in 2011. Before joining the Rice faculty, Ma was an associate professor of mathematics at the University of California at Davis.

Sebastian Perez-Salazar, assistant professor of CMOR: He earned a Ph.D. in algorithms, combinatorics, and optimization (ACO) from Georgia Tech this 2022, and a B.Eng. and M.S. in applied mathematics in 2016, both from the Universidad de Chile in Santiago. Perez-Salazar is broadly interested in operations research and optimization under uncertainty. He works on models and applications of decision-making under uncertainty, and much of his current work is motivated by applications in cloud computing and e-commerce.

Bo Jones, Pfeiffer Postdoctoral Instructor in CMOR: He earned his Ph.D. this year in industrial and systems engineering from the University of Southern California, and his B.A. in applied mathematics from Claremont McKenna College in 2017.