George E. Nicholson Student Paper Competition is held each year to honor outstanding papers in the field of operations research and the management sciences written by a student. Zhi Chen is the finalist with the paper “Tractable Distributionally Robust Optimization with Data“. The paper is co-authored with Professor Melvyn Sim (Department of Analytics & Operations, NUS Business School) and Peng Xiong (Institute of Operations Research and Analytics, NUS).

Zhi Chen received his PhD from the Department of Analytics & Operations, NUS Business School, 2017. He has been advised by Professor Melvyn Sim and his primary research involves decision-making under uncertainty using tools of Robust Optimization, Satisficing Theory, and Markov Decision Process. Prior to joining NUS, he earned his B.Eng from Tsinghua University, China.