Todd Munson, B.S. 1995, visited UNO in late September and gave talks to the UNO Math Club and the Mathematics Colloquium concerning his research in optimization at Argonne National Laboratory. Todd received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin in 2000 and has been a postdoctoral researcher at Argonne since then. He is working on quadratic programming problems involving up to 100 million variables used, for example, in processing credit card applications.

Todd grew up in Omaha and went to Papillion-LaVista High School. While an undergraduate at UNO he especially enjoyed courses in combinatorics from John Konvalina and optimization from Betty Hickman. In fact, it was Dr. Hickman who especially encouraged him to go to graduate school. After finishing his postdoctoral appointment at Argonne, Todd is undecided about staying on as a scientist or obtaining an academic appointment at a research university. Todd can be reached at tmunson@mcs.anl.gov.