Rate My Professor Charl Ras

Associate Professor Charl Ras is a senior lecturer in the School of Mathematics and Statistics, Faculty of Science, at the University of Melbourne, where he specializes in Operations Research. His research centers on combinatorial optimisation, discrete and computational geometry, shortest network design, and survivable networks. These interests encompass algorithms, graph theory, network design problems in telecommunications, and efficient algorithmic solutions for operations research challenges. Ras contributes to research centers including the ARC Centre of Excellence for Mathematical and Statistical Frontiers (ACEMS) and OPTIMA.

Ras completed his PhD in Mathematics at the University of Johannesburg in 2008, focusing on distance-two colourings of graphs motivated by the Channel Assignment problem in telecommunications. From 2008 to 2013, he held a research fellowship in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at the University of Melbourne. In December 2013, he was appointed Lecturer in Optimisation in the School of Mathematics and Statistics, progressing to senior lecturer and associate professor. His scholarly output includes 32 publications with 148 citations as per ResearchGate. Key works feature 'An exact algorithm for disaster-resilience augmentation of planar networks' (2025, with Alexander Westcott), 'An improved exact algorithm for the Euclidean k-Steiner tree problem' (2026, with Jae Lee, Marcus Brazil, and Doreen Thomas), 'Network augmentation for disaster-resilience against earthquakes' (2022), 'Structural Properties of Minimum Multi-source Multi-Sink Steiner Networks in the Euclidean Plane' (2023, with Marcus Brazil), 'Identification of Active Component Functions in Finite-Max Minimisation via a Smooth Reformulation' (recent, with Matthew Tam), 'Computing Skeletons for Rectilinearly Convex Obstacles in the Euclidean Plane' (2020), and 'Air and Missile Defence Optimisation Methodology Survey' (2016, with Mark Fackrell and Li Zhang). In 2014, he received a Dyason Fellowship for geometric construction of minimum-power ad-hoc networks. Ras engages the public through Pursuit articles like 'Can you solve the skeleton puzzle?' (2025) and supervises PhD students, including in discrete mathematics.