Michael C. Grant, Ph.D.

Michael Grant is a computational mathematician specializing in optimization, signal processing, and simulation, and a contributor in classroom, research, and commercial settings. He is currently the Director of Technical Consulting Anaconda, Inc. (formerly Continuum Analytics), and the co-founder of CVX Research.

Michael is best known as the primary developer and maintainer of CVX, a popular modeling framework for disciplined convex programming, in collaboration with Stanford professor Stephen Boyd. In 2012, Michael and Stephen were awarded the Beale-Orchard-Hays Prize for Excellence in Computational Mathematical Programming for their work on CVX. Three years later, Michael was awarded the prize for the second consecutive time with co-authors Stephen Becker and Emmanuel Candès for their joint work on TFOCS. To date, Michael is the only person to have won the award twice.

Michael was a co-founder and vice president of product development at Numerical Technologies, Inc. (later acquired by Synopsys), which applied advanced numerical methods to the simulation, verification, and design of the semiconductor lithography process. He was also an early contributor to Clarity Wireless, Inc. (later acquired by Cisco Systems, Inc.), which designed and produced advanced wireless networking algorithms, chipsets, and equipment. He co-founded Cardinal Optimization Inc., a company devoted to the commercialization of several optimization-based localization technologies.

At Stanford University, Michael served as a consulting assistant professor in the Information Systems Laboratory and as a research associate in the Department of Energy Resources Engineering. At the California Institute of Technology, he served as a staff scientist in the Department of Applied and Computational Mathematics. He also served as a guest lecturer for the Operations Research and Industrial Engineering Group at the University of Texas at Austin.

Michael received a B.S. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the The University of Texas at Austin in 1990; and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 1992 and 2005, respectively, as part of the Information Systems Laboratory. He was the recipient of a National Merit Scholarship, a Virginia and Ernest Cockrell, Jr. Scholarship in Engineering, and a National Science Foundation Fellowship.

Michael currently lives in Austin, TX, where he enjoys spending time with his wife Callie and daughter Anna, indulging in a few video games, and serving in his church.

A PDF version of his CV is available here.