Biography
Frans Schalekamp received his Ph.D. in Operations Research from Cornell University in 2007. He has worked both in academia and in industry on three continents, and on areas ranging from plant breeding and genetics to logistics. Former academic positions were at the Institute for Theoretical Computer Science at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, the Department of Mathematics at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Va., and the Computer Science Department at Cornell University. He held positions in industry as a research scientist at NatureSourceGenetics in Ithaca, N.Y., and as a senior analyst at CarMax in Richmond, Va.
Research Interests
Frans’s research interests lie in optimization, both in practice and theory. He has worked on problems in bioinformatics, sensor networks and information science. His interest in theoretical aspects of optimization is focused in particular on designing approximation algorithms for NP-hard problems, and understanding limitations on finding good solutions to problems. Practical implementations and seeing how well methods do in practice is a further interest. At NatureSourceGenetics he designed practical algorithms for finding good plant breeding strategies.
Teaching Interests
Frans has taught courses in operations research, computer science and mathematics departments. Courses he taught at Cornell include ORIE 3310 (Optimization II), ENGRI 1101 (Engineering Applications of Operations Research), ORIE 4580 (Simulation Modeling and Analysis), CS 4820 (Introduction to Analysis of Algorithms) (co-taught with Bobby Kleinberg). He also enjoyed teaching calculus and linear algebra at William & Mary.
Select Publications
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Frans Schalekamp, András Sebő, Vera Traub and Anke van Zuylen. Layers and Matroids for the Traveling Salesman’s Paths. Operations Research Letters 46(1) (2018) pp. 60-63
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Frans Schalekamp, David P. Williamson, Anke van Zuylen. 2-Matchings, the Traveling Salesman Problem, and the Subtour LP: A Proof of the Boyd-Carr Conjecture. Mathematics of Operations Research, 39(2) (2014) pp. 403-417
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Frans Schalekamp, Rene Sitters, Suzanne van der Ster, Leen Stougie, Victor Verdugo, Anke van Zuylen. Split Scheduling with Uniform Setup Times.
Journal of Scheduling 18(2) (2015) pp. 119-129 -
Frans Schalekamp, Anke van Zuylen, Suzanne van der Ster. A Duality Based 2-Approximation Algorithm for Maximum Agreement Forest. ICALP 2016
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Henry Lin, Frans Schalekamp. Brief Announcement: On the Complexity of the Minimum Latency Scheduling Problem on the Euclidean Plane. SPAA 2012
pp. 80-81
Select Awards and Honors
- ORIE Professor of the Year (undergraduate voted) 2020-21
- Simon Prize for Excellence in the Teaching of Mathematics 2014
- Cornell Graduate Fellowship 2002
- MacMullen Operations Research Fellowship 2001
- 1/2 MIT Presidential Fellowship 2001 (declined)
- VVS Scriptieprijs (Award for best Master's thesis by Dutch Society for Operations Research and Statistics 2001) for thesis On Shuffling Cards (together with Anke van Zuylen) 2001
Education
- M.A. (Econometrics and Operations Research), Vrije University in Amsterdam (Netherlands) 2000
- Ph.D. (Operations Research), Cornell University 2007