Michael Grant is a computational mathematician specializing in optimization, signal processing, and simulation. He is the primary developer and maintainer of CVX, a modeling framework for disciplined convex programming. As of April 2009, CVX had been incorporated into coursework in at least 29 universities and used in some capacity in over 120 additional universities, research institutions, and corporations. He is also a co-developer of TFOCS, a tookit for the development of accelerated first-order methods for convex optimization.
Dr. Grant 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.
After the completion of his doctorate, Dr. Grant remained at Stanford to serve as a consulting assistant professor in the Information Systems Laboratory. He also served as a research associate in the Department of Energy Resources Engineering, where he assisted in the development of the Smart Fields Consortium, a multidisciplinary program tasked with applying advanced optimization methods to petroleum reservoir development. He has also served for several years as co-founder and chief engineer of Cardinal Optimization Inc., a company devoted to the commercialization of several optimization-based localization technologies.
In the 1990s, Dr. Grant 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 holds a part-time position as Staff Scientist in the Department of Applied and Computational Mathematics at the California Institute of Technology, where he participates in research in the area of compressed sensing. In addition, he teaches an annual, graduate-level course in Nonlinear Programming for the Operations Research and Industrial Engineering Group at the The University of Texas at Austin.
Dr. Grant 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.