Kibaek Kim has received an Early Career Research award from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Science. The award identifies exceptional, promising young researchers and provides funding for their research for the next five years.

Kim is an assistant computational mathematician in Argonne National Laboratory’s Mathematics and Computer Science Division. He also is a principal investigator in the Argonne-led MACSER (Multifaceted Mathematics for Rare, High-Impact Events in Complex Energy and Environment Systems) project, in which he has been devising reformulations of distributionally robust two-stage stochastic programs.

With the Early Career funding, Kim plans to explore a new approach that makes multistage decisions under uncertainty from unknown distribution, in which uncertain events occur sequentially over multiple periods of time.

Kim received his Ph.D. in industrial engineering and management sciences from Northwestern University. His research primarily involves computational optimization, including stochastic programming and integer programming, with applications to energy planning, healthcare systems and bioenergy. Recent studies have included development of algorithms for solving stochastic mixed-integer programs using high-performance computing clusters.