I am an assistant professor in the Johns Hopkins Department of Applied Math and Statistics, joining after finishing my PhD in Operations Research at Cornell University, advised by Jim Renegar and Damek Davis. I spent Spring 2020 with Google Research working on adversarial optimization and Fall 2017 at UC Berkeley as part of a Simons Institute program bridging continuous and discrete optimization.
My current research focuses on the design and analysis of algorithms for continuous optimization problems beyond the areas where classical theory applies. For example, the selected works below all address fundamental issues in modern optimization problems, bridging the gap between classical approaches and the potentially stochastic, nonconvex, nonsmooth, nonLipschitz, adversarial objectives employed on many modern data science and machine learning problems. During my PhD, I was awarded an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship supporting this research.
Office: N419 Wyman Hall
Email: grimmer at jhu.edu
CV: here
Twitter: @prof_grimmer (mostly sharing pretty 3D prints)
Selected Recent Papers
| Gauges and Accelerated Optimization over Smooth and/or Strongly Convex Sets | arXiv |
| Ning Liu, Benjamin Grimmer. |
| First-Order Methods for Nonsmooth Nonconvex Functional Constrained Optimization with or without Slater Points | arXiv |
| Zhichao Jia, Benjamin Grimmer. |
| Radial Duality Part I: Foundations and Part II: Applications and Algorithms | arXiv: Part I, Part II |
| Benjamin Grimmer. |
| The Landscape of the Proximal Point Method for Nonconvex-Nonconcave Minimax Optimization | Mathematical Programming, 2022 |
| Benjamin Grimmer, Haihao Lu, Pratik Worah, Vahab Mirrokni. | arXiv |
Student Advisees* and Collaborators†
| Ning Liu* (PhD Candidate) | Johns Hopkins, AMS |
| Thabo Samakhoana* (PhD Student) | Johns Hopkins, AMS |
| Zhichao Jia* (Masters) | Johns Hopkins, AMS |
| Danlin Li* (Masters) | Johns Hopkins, AMS |
| Ziyi Wei* (Masters) | Johns Hopkins, AMS |
| Julian Francis* (Undergraduate) | Howard University |
| Saeid Hajizadeh† (PhD) | UIC, MSCS |