Illya Hicks joined the Department of Computational and Applied Mathematics at Rice in 2007. Previously, Illya served as faculty member in the Industrial and Systems Engineering Department at Texas A&M University from 2000 to 2006. Illya received an MA and PhD in Computational and Applied Mathematics (2000) from Rice University and a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Southwest Texas State University (currently Texas State University at San Marcos). Illya is currently the faculty advisor to the undergraduate chapter of the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE) and Black Graduate Student Association at the Rice. Illya has served Rice as a faculty senator and as faculty advisor to the president.
WEBSITE(S)| Research Site
Research Areas
Illya Hicks’ research interests are in combinatorial optimization, graph theory, and integer programming with applications in big data, imaging, social networks, cancer treatment, and logistics. In particular, he has done extensive research in finding cohesive groups in data networks and utilizing graph decomposition techniques to solve computationally difficult discrete optimization problems.
Education
PhD and MA in Computational and Applied Mathematics, Rice University, (2000).
BS in Mathematics, Texas State University, (1995).
Teaching Areas
Illya Hicks teaches courses in operations research, graph theory, combinatorial optimization, linear and integer optimization, engineering computation, and real analysis.
Honors & Awards
INFORMS Fellow
Presidential Mentoring Award
Moving Spirit Award from the Institute for Operations Research and Management Science (INFORMS)
2005 Optimization Prize for Young Researchers from the Optimization Society of INFORMS