Pablo Parrilo
Joseph F. and Nancy P. Keithley Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
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Pablo A. Parrilo is the Joseph F. and Nancy P. Keithley Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, with a joint appointment in Mathematics. He is affiliated with the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) and the Operations Research Center (ORC). Past appointments include assistant professor at the Automatic Control Laboratory of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich), and visiting associate professor at the California Institute of Technology. He received an electronics engineering undergraduate degree from the University of Buenos Aires and a PhD in Control and Dynamical Systems from the California Institute of Technology.
His research interests include mathematical optimization, machine learning, control and identification, robustness analysis and synthesis, and the development and application of computational tools based on convex optimization and algorithmic algebra to practically relevant engineering problems.
Parrilo has received several distinctions, including the Donald P. Eckman Award of the American Automatic Control Council, the SIAM Activity Group on Control and Systems Theory (SIAG/CST) Prize, the IEEE Antonio Ruberti Young Researcher Prize, and the Farkas Prize of the INFORMS Optimization Society. He is an IEEE and SIAM Fellow.
Publications
- Ahmadi, A. A., Blekherman, G., & Parrilo, P. A. (2025). Convex ternary quartics are SOS-convex. SIAM Journal on Optimization, 35(3), 1899–1913.
- Altschuler, J. M., & Parrilo, P. A. (2025). Acceleration by stepsize hedging: Multi-step descent and the silver stepsize schedule. Journal of the ACM, 72(2), Article 12.
- Marcucci, T., Umenberger, J., Parrilo, P. A., & Tedrake, R. (2024). Shortest paths in graphs of convex sets. SIAM Journal on Optimization, 34(1), 507–532.
Media
- December 4, 2025: MIT News, MIT School of Engineering faculty and staff receive awards in summer 2025
- October 17, 2025: MIT LIDS, Jason Altschuler and Pablo Parrilo receive INFORMS Computing Society Prize
- November 30, 2023: MIT News, A new optimization framework for robot motion planning