Greetings from Vermont!
My name is Sam Chevalier. I am an assistant professor of electrical engineering at the University of Vermont (my alma mater!), where I am part of the CREATE research center and a faculty affiliate of the Complex Systems Institute. Within CREATE, I run the Grid Verification Lab. We focus on hard computational problems that emerge from areas like power grid operations, nonconvex optimization, and machine learning verification. Until fall of 2023, I was a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) with Spyros Chatzivasileiadis. Prior to DTU, I received my PhD (‘21) from the mechanical engineering department at MIT. For more information, download my CV.
I presently chair the Power and Energy Society (PES) chapter of the IEEE Green Mountain Section (mainly Vermont). Join us!
Research Questions
Across all of our research applications, numerical optimization unites everything we do. Here are some representative questions we tackle:
- Given a convex relaxation, what is the mechanistic source of relaxation looseness? Can targeted cuts break the relaxation barrier?
- Can sequentially tightening a convex relaxation to global optimality outperform branch-and-bound?
- For a given computation time budget, what’s the optimal amount of time to spend on pre-solve activities (e.g., optimization based bound tightening)?
Here is a power grid. Play with it!
★ Lab Recruitment ★
I’m looking to maintain a strong team of fully funded mathematical innovators who are passionate about solving real-world (i) power grid, (ii) network optimization, and (iii) ML verification problems. If these topics excite you, reach out to me at schevali [at] uvm.edu.
Education
- Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2016-2021). Thesis.
- M.S. in Electrical Engineering, University of Vermont (2015-2016). Thesis.
- B.S. in Electrical Engineering, University of Vermont (2011-2015). Thesis.
Publications
- Please visit my Google Scholar to see an updated publication list.
- All articles are hosted on my arXiv page.
