About


I am currently a SNSF postdoctoral fellow at MIT CSAIL, supervised by Stefanie Jegelka. Previously, I completed my PhD at EPFL, where I was supervised by Andreas Loukas and Pierre Vandergheynst. My research focus is at the intersection of combinatorial optimization and machine learning, where I develop novel methods that utilize neural networks to solve diverse combinatorial and algorithmic problems. Recently, I have been working on:

  • Designing neural network-based algorithms for combinatorial optimization problems with worst-case guarantees.
  • Rounding (convex) relaxations to combinatorial optimization problems.
  • Leveraging the power of local search algorithms in machine learning problems.

If you are a PhD student interested in working with me in any of those areas feel free to shoot me an email!

Outside of research, I love doing parkour. Finally, I’m a big fan of the original Matrix trilogy so there will be posts about that here as well.


Email: stalence(at)mit(dot)edu