Miguel Anjos received his PhD in Combinatorics and Optimization in 2001 under the supervision of Henry Wolkowicz. The title of his thesis is "New Convex Relaxations for the Maximum Cut and VLSI Layout Problems".
The maximum-cut problem and VLSI layout problems are known to be NP-hard. Therefore, much research has been devoted to finding tractable convex relaxations. Many popular relaxations are based on semidefinite programming (SDP).
Professor Anjos derived and studied two strengthened SDP relaxations for maximum-cut. These relaxations were provably tighter than the best relaxations in the literature at the time. For VLSI layout, new relaxations were derived based on the convexification of the concept of "target distance" and were shown to provide tighter bounds than those in the literature.
Professor Anjos has received many awards and honours. Among them are
- Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal for significant contributions to mathematical optimization and its industry applications.
- Canada Research Chair (Tier 2) since 2011.
- Humboldt Research Fellowship for Experienced Researchers in 2009-2010.
- Meritas Best Teacher Award from Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal for 2011-2012.
- Outstanding Performance Award from the University of Waterloo in 2007.
- His paper entitled "A Semidefinite Optimization Approach for the Single-Row Layout Problem with Unequal Dimensions", co-authored with A. Kennings and A. Vannelli, was a Top-10 Cited Paper in the journal Discrete Optimization for the period 2005-2010.
Professor Anjos has also held many significant leadership positions, including: program director of the SIAM Optimization Interest Group (2011-2013), council member of the Mathematical Optimization Society (2012-2014), vice-chair (Linear Prog. & Complementarity) of the INFORMS Optimization Society (2010-2011), and associate editor for Discrete Applied Mathematics (since 2007).
Professor Anjos continues to do research in the challenging problems that lie on the boundary of theoretical and applied optimization, particularly for engineering problems. SDP relaxations continue to be a major theme in his research, and he is especially interested in smart grids and facility layout design.