Retsef Levi is the J. Spencer Standish (1945) Professor of Management, Associate Professor of Operations Management at the Sloan School of Management, MIT. He is a member of the Operations Management Group at Sloan and affiliated with the Operations Research Center and the Computational for Design and Optimization Program. Before coming to MIT, he spent a year in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center as the holder of the Goldstine Postdoctoral Fellowship. He received a Bachelor's degree in Mathematics from Tel-Aviv University (Israel) in 2001, and a PhD in Operations Research from Cornell University in 2005. Levi spent more than 11 years in the Israeli Defense Forces as an Officer in the Intelligence Wing. After leaving the Military, Levi joined and emerging new Israeli hi-tech company as a Business Development Consultant.

 

Levi's current research is focused on the design and the performance analysis of efficient algorithms for fundamental stochastic and deterministic optimization models, arising in the context of supply chains and inventory, revenue management, logistics and healthcare management. These fundamental, multistage stochastic models are typically very hard to solve optimally, both theoretically and in practice. Hence, it is important to develop efficient heuristics that provide provably near-optimal policies for these hard models. Levi has special interest in Cost-Balancing techniques, data-driven (sampling-based) algorithms, and modern Linear-Programming-based approximation techniques applied to models in the above domains. In addition, he is interested in stochastic and combinatorial optimization and mathematical programming in their broad definition, and especially in their intersection with problems that arise in the context of real-life applications.

 

Levi has received the NSF Faculty Early Career Development award and the 2008 INFORMS Optimization Prize for Young Researchers.