Rate My Professor James Saunderson

James Saunderson is a Senior Lecturer and Director of Education in the Department of Electrical and Computer Systems Engineering within Monash University’s Faculty of Engineering. He received Bachelor of Engineering and Bachelor of Science degrees, both with Honours, from the University of Melbourne in 2008. He completed a Master of Science in 2011 and a Doctor of Philosophy in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in 2015 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After his PhD, Saunderson was a Research Associate at the University of Washington and Postdoctoral Scholar at the California Institute of Technology from June 2015 to June 2016. He joined Monash University in 2016 as a Lecturer, served as an ARC Discovery Early-Career Research Fellow from 2020 to 2024, and advanced to Senior Lecturer.

Saunderson’s research focuses on mathematical optimization, particularly convex optimization and semidefinite programming, exploring algebraic and geometric structures to develop efficient algorithms with performance guarantees. Applications include signal processing, machine learning, power systems, quantum information theory, and quantum metrology. He supervises PhD students such as Nimita Shinde (2018–2022), Kerry He (2022–2025), Hin Long (Brian) Ng (2022–present), Shuvayan Banerjee (2021–present), and Sulaiman Al Hasani. He teaches courses including ECE2111 Signals and Systems, ECE3093 Optimisation and Numerical Methods for Engineers, and ECE4132 Control System Design. Saunderson serves as Associate Editor for the SIAM Journal on Applied Algebra and Geometry since 2022 and received the SIAM Activity Group on Optimization Best Paper Prize in 2020. His publications have accumulated over 1,400 citations with an h-index of 21. Key works include “Efficient computation of the quantum rate-distortion function” (Quantum, 2024), “A Bregman Proximal Perspective on Classical and Quantum Blahut-Arimoto Algorithms” (IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 2024), “Spectral Polyhedra” (Forum of Mathematics, Sigma, 2025), and “Interior Point Methods for Structured Quantum Relative Entropy Optimization Problems” (Mathematical Programming Computation, 2025), all with co-authors Kerry He and Hamza Fawzi where noted.