Vivek Farias is the Patrick J. McGovern (1959) Professor at MIT, where his research focuses on reinforcement learning, inference, approximation algorithms, and dynamic optimization, with recent applications in commerce platforms and biology. His work develops algorithmic and statistical foundations for decision-making in complex stochastic systems.
He received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 2007. Vivek’s research and teaching have been recognized with major honors including the NSF CAREER Award, MIT’s Jameson Prize for teaching, the MSOM Young Scholar Prize, the Wagner Prize, the Pierskalla Award, and election as an INFORMS Fellow, as well as best paper awards from INFORMS MSOM, JFIG, the Simulation Society, and the Pricing and Revenue Management Section. His doctoral students have received several of the field’s top honors, including the Nicholson, MSOM, APS, and RMP student paper prizes, as well as NeurIPS Oral presentations.
Vivek has also helped translate research into practice through multiple technology companies. He was co-founder and CTO of Celect, acquired by Nike; contributed foundational technology at Seer, which later went public; and was co-founder and CTO of Cimulate, acquired by Salesforce. He currently serves as Head of Science for Salesforce Commerce Cloud.
