Steven Dirkse, PhD

Dr. Steven Dirkse received his PhD in Computer Science from UW-Madison in 1994. After a year of teaching math and CS at Calvin College, he joined the staff at GAMS Development in 1995, becoming Director of Optimization in 2003 and President in 2016. His primary focus has been in software development, notably solvers and solver links, data utilities, multi-threading, and quality control and performance testing. He has also consulted on optimization projects with several GAMS clients during this time.

Steve has published in many leading journals, gives lectures at conferences, and is an active member of the community: e.g., he is a past Director and Secretary/Treasurer of the INFORMS Computing Society. As part of his thesis research he developed the PATH solver for Mixed Complementarity Problems (MCP), a robust, large-scale solver that was a great leap forward in solving MCP. For the work on the PATH solver he was awarded the Beale-Orchard-Hayes Prize in 1997.