Illya Hicks, professor of computational and applied mathematics (CAAM), has been named chair of that department, effective July 1.

Hicks joined the Rice faculty in 2007. He earned his M.A. and Ph.D. in CAAM in 2000 from Rice. From 2000 to 2006 he was a member of the Industrial and Systems Engineering faculty at Texas A&M University.

His research interests include combinatorial optimization, integer programming, graph theory and matroid theory, with applications in social networks, cancer treatment and network design.

Last year, Hicks was named a fellow of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS). He is a member of its Minority Issues Forum and won the 2005 Optimization Prize for Young Researchers within the INFORMS Optimization Society. In 2015, he received the Presidential Mentoring Award from Rice.

Hicks is also a member of the Mathematical Optimization Society, the National Association of Mathematicians, the American Mathematical Society, the Society for Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science, and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.

He serves as faculty adviser to the undergraduate chapter of the National Society of Black Engineers and the Black Graduate Student Association at Rice, and previously served as a faculty senator and as faculty advisor to the university president.

The outgoing CAAM chair is Keith Cooper, the L. John and Ann H. Doerr Professor in Computational Engineering, who has served in that position since 2019.

Author: PATRICK KURP