Bio: Shiqian Ma is currently an associate professor in the Department of Computational Applied Mathematics and Operations Research at Rice University. He received his PhD in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research from Columbia University. His current research interests include theory and algorithms for large-scale optimization, and its various applications in statistics, machine learning, and signal processing. His research is currently supported by NSF Grants from the DMS, CCF, and ECCS programs. Shiqian received the INFORMS Optimization Society Best Student Paper Prize in 2010, an honorable mention in the INFORMS George Nicholson Student Paper Competition in 2011, the Journal of the Operations Research Society of China Excellent Paper Award in 2016, Distinguished Paper Award in ICCM 2017, Excellence Award for Visiting Scholar at Tencent AI Lab in 2018, and the SIAM Review SIGEST Award in 2023. Shiqian is an Associate Editor of Journal of Machine Learning Research, Journal of Scientific Computing, and Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications, and an Area Chair of ICML, NeurIPS, ICLR and AISTATS. He is a plenary speaker of the Texas Colloquium on Distributed Learning in 2023 and a semi-plenary speaker of the XVI International Conference on Stochastic Programming in 2023. Shiqian is the elected Secretary/Treasurer of the INFORMS Optimization Society, and is the General Chair of the INFORMS Optimization Society Conference 2024.