Jeffrey M. Larson

Jeffrey Larson is a computational mathematician at Argonne. His research centers on optimization algorithms and their implementation in software.

Jeff is the Argonne lead for the Fundamental Algorithmic Research toward Quantum Utility (FAR-Qu) project where he develops numerical optimization methods to solve problems in the quantum information sciences. He is a member of Q-NEXT, one of five National Quantum Information Science Research Centers awarded by the Department of Energy in August 2020. He is a lead developer of libEnsemble, a Python library to coordinate the concurrent evaluation of ensembles of computations, and IBCDFO, a library for solving Interpolation-Based Composite Derivative-Free Optimization problems. He leads the Numerical Optimization Area in the FASTMath SciDAC Institute. He has developed APOSMM, an asynchronously parallel optimization solver for finding multiple minima, and other derivative-free optimization algorithms that exploit problem structure in scientific applications. He also studies approaches for the fuel-efficient routing of autonomous vehicles through road networks.

Jeff joined Argonne in 2014 as a postdoctoral appointee. He was previously a postdoctoral researcher at the Royal Institute of Technology KTH in Sweden. He earned his Ph.D. in applied mathematics from the University of Colorado Denver in 2012.

Research Interests:

• Quantum computing
• Simulation-based, black-box, or derivative-free optimization
• Optimal vehicle routing