Waquar Kaleem

PhD Candidate, Industrial Engineering and Operations Research · Penn State

Curriculum vitae

Education

PhD, Industrial Engineering and Operations Research The Pennsylvania State University, 2022–2027 expected

Advised by Anirudh Subramanyam. Dissertation, Scalable AI-integrated optimization for electrified transportation and logistics. Committee: Paul Griffin, Aron Laszka, S. Ilgin Guler, Changhyun Kwon.

MS, Industrial Engineering and Operations Research The Pennsylvania State University, 2024

Earned en route to the PhD.

BTech, Petroleum Engineering Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Petroleum Technology, India, 2020

Thesis, Machine learning for lithology and hydrocarbon zone identification from well log data. Director’s Gold Medal, awarded to one graduating student across all disciplines.

Research experience

Research Aide Technical, Transportation and Power Systems Division Argonne National Laboratory, Lemont, IL, May–August 2026

Supervised by Taner Cokyasar. Robust EV charging infrastructure planning under decision-dependent uncertainty, and value function approximation for matching and pricing in truckload freight markets.

Optimization Research Intern Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, Cambridge, MA, September–December 2025

Supervised by Arvind U. Raghunathan. Grid-connected EV charging schedule optimization, leading to a joint patent filing.

Givens Associate, Mathematics and Computer Science Argonne National Laboratory, Lemont, IL, May–August 2024

Supervised by Jeffrey M. Larson and Taner Cokyasar. Stochastic charger location and allocation for last-mile delivery, using Lagrangian decomposition with cutting planes across 680 CPU cores, producing the largest solved instance in the literature.

Machine Learning Research Intern Rezlytix Technologies, remote, July–October 2020

Synthetic seismic datasets and machine learning models outperforming conventional three-dimensional mapping at 87 percent accuracy.

Undergraduate Research Assistant The Pennsylvania State University, May–August 2019

Advised by Sanjay Srinivasan. A lattice Boltzmann simulator for modeling CO₂ plume migration in saline reservoirs, as an S. N. Bose Scholar of the Indo-US Science and Technology Forum.

Drilling Engineer, Research and Development Division Oil and Natural Gas Corporation, Rajahmundry, India, November 2020–July 2022

Well placement optimization in hydrocarbon reservoirs using machine learning models for spatial variability prediction.

Funded projects

Offline model-based discrete optimization, theory, algorithms, and applications to service systems. Harold and Inge Marcus Endowment for the Technion and Penn State IE Partnership, $24,000, 2024–2026.
Climate-resilient electric bus infrastructure planning. Lee Schipper Memorial Scholarship, Volvo Research and Educational Foundations, Global Scholar track, $12,500, 2026. Top ten finalist.

Professional service

Referee for Transportation Research Part C, European Journal of Operational Research, Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence, Computers and Industrial Engineering, and Geoscience and Energy, and for the Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting, the IISE Annual Conference, the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics and Society, and SBP-BRiMS.

Secretary, INFORMS Student Chapter, Penn State, 2024–2026.
Committee member, Data Science Engineering and Analytics Subcommittee, SPE Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition.
Volunteer organizer, International Conference on Unconventional Energy Resources, 2019. Best Volunteer Award.
President, Society of Exploration Geophysicists Student Chapter, RGIPT.
Organizing Secretary, Science and Technical Committee, RGIPT.
Volunteer, Gyan-Arpan, an initiative of the Arpan social club teaching students from local schools, RGIPT.

Professional memberships

Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences, Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers, Mathematical Optimization Society, and Society of Petroleum Engineers.

Honors and awards

2026: Argonne Training Program on Extreme-Scale Computing, U.S. Department of Energy.
2026: Top ten finalist, Lee Schipper Memorial Scholarship, Volvo Research and Educational Foundations, Global Scholar track.
2025–2026: IISE Future Faculty Fellow, selected nationally.
2025: Marcus Graduate Student Scholarship, Penn State, $10,000, one of six awarded from twenty-two nominees.
2025: Honorable Mention, Poster Award, Penn State AI Hub.
2025: Travel Award, Mixed Integer Programming Workshop.
2024: Best Paper Award, IISE Logistics and Supply Chain Division.
2020: Director’s Gold Medal, RGIPT, awarded to one graduating student across all disciplines.
2019: S. N. Bose Scholar, Indo-US Science and Technology Forum, sole petroleum engineering student selected from India.
2019: DAAD WISE Research Scholarship, Germany.
2019: AAPG L. Austin Weeks Undergraduate Research Grant.
2019: Second Runner-Up, Best Paper, SPE South Asia Regional Student Paper Contest.