Lan's paper considers an important class of convex programming problems whose objective function, given by the summation of a smooth and non-smooth component, is contaminated by stochastic noise. His major contribution is to introduce the first theoretically optimal method for solving this class of problems and demonstrate its significant advantages over the existing algorithms.

The ICS Student Paper Prize was presented at the 2008 INFORMS Annual Meeting in October. Lan, who is advised by Professors Arkadi Nemirovksi, Renato Monteiro, and Alex Shaprio, made a presentation in a special ICS Prize session at the meeting.

The Award Committee consisted of David Morton (Chair), University of Texas at Austin, Alper Atamturk, University of California, Berkeley, and Nick Sahinidis, Carnegie Mellon University. The ICS Student Paper Award is sponsored by the Mica Foundation of Denmark and is accompanied by a plaque and a $500 honorarium.

This is the second year in a row that an ISyE PhD student has placed in this prize. In 2007, Richa Agarwal, advised by Professor Ozlem Ergun, was a runner-up in the Computing Society Student Paper Competition.

Lan also received second place in the INFORMS George Nicholson student paper competition for his paper. The 2008 Nicholson Prize Committee is chaired by Georgia Perakis from MIT. The committee members are: John Birge (University of Chicago), Rene A. Caldentey (New York University), Michael C. Ferris (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Retsef Levi (MIT), Andrew Lim (Berkeley), Mahesh Nagarajan (UBC), Melvyn Sim (National University of Singapore), Amy Ward (USC), Jiawei Zhang (New York U.), Max Shen (Berkeley).