Mahdi Soltanolkotabi is currently an assistant professor in the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Southern California. Prior to joining USC, he completed his PhD in electrical engineering at Stanford in 2014. He was a postdoctoral researcher in the EECS department at UC Berkeley during the 2014-2015 academic year. His research focuses on the design and mathematical understanding of computationally efficient algorithms for optimization, high dimensional statistics, machine learning, signal processing and computational imaging. Recently, a main focus of his research has been on developing and analyzing algorithms for non-convex optimization, with provable guarantees of convergence to the global optimum.