Somayeh Sojoudi is an Associate Professor in the Departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences and Mechanical Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. She earned her PhD in Control and Dynamical Systems from the California Institute of Technology in 2013. She joined UC Berkeley in July 2017 initially as an Assistant Professor in Residence and was promoted to Associate Professor. Her research addresses interdisciplinary challenges in optimization theory—including non-convex optimization, low-rank optimization, and conic optimization—machine learning, control systems, power systems, and numerical algorithms. These efforts span artificial intelligence, control, intelligent systems, robotics, and power and energy applications.

Sojoudi has earned numerous accolades for her contributions, including the NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award and Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award in 2021, elevation to IEEE Fellow effective January 2026, INFORMS Optimization Society Prize for Young Researchers in 2015, INFORMS Data Mining Best Paper Award in 2018 for “Graphical Lasso and Thresholding: Equivalence and Closed-form Solutions,” and INFORMS Energy, Natural Resources, and the Environment Best Publication Award in 2016 for “Convex Relaxation for Optimal Power Flow Problem: Mesh Networks.” Additional honors include the IEEE Power and Energy Society Best-of-the-Best Conference Paper Award in 2022 for “A MILP for Optimal Measurement Choice in Robust Power Grid State Estimation” and several best student paper awards as advisor. Her publications feature prominent works such as “Pausing Policy Learning in Non-stationary Reinforcement Learning” (oral presentation, ICML 2024), “Transport of Algebraic Structure to Latent Embeddings” (spotlight, ICML 2024), “Asymmetric Certified Robustness via Feature-Convex Neural Networks” (NeurIPS 2023), and “Projected Randomized Smoothing for Certified Adversarial Robustness” (Transactions on Machine Learning Research, 2023), with over 3,900 citations on Google Scholar. She serves as Senior Associate Editor for IEEE Systems Journal, Chair of the Women in Systems Engineering Committee of the IEEE Systems Council, and Area Chair for conferences including NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, and AAAI. Sojoudi has delivered keynote speeches, such as at the IEEE International Symposium on Systems Engineering in 2024, and organized workshops on optimization and machine learning.

Professional Email: sojoudi@berkeley.edu