Sebastian Pokutta received his master's degree (2003) and PhD (2005) in Mathematics from the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany. Subsequent to his graduate studies, he worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the MIT Operations Research Center. Upon completion, Pokutta was appointed as an optimization specialist at IBM ILOG, and later joined KDB Krall Demmel Baumgarten, a risk management consultancy. He then returned to academia as a research scientist at the Technische Universität Darmstadt, and was a visiting lecturer at MIT, and a professor at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg. He is now the David M. McKenney Family Associate Professor in the Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech. He is also the director of the Interactive Optimization and Learning Lab and an Associate Director of the Center for Machine Learning @ GT.