Research overview
My name is Anna Timonina-Farkas and I am a Research Professor at the International Institute for Management Development (IMD) in Lausanne, Switzerland, and the founder of FindeX. My research focuses on theory and data-driven solution methods in multi-stage optimization under model and decision-dependent uncertainties. Application areas include financial planning, inventory control, energy production and trading, pension fund management, supply chain resilience, and high-dimensional information retrieval.
I earned my PhD degree (with honors) in Statistics and Operations Research at the University of Vienna in April 2014, with a dissertation devoted to theoretical and practical aspects of multi-stage stochastic optimization. Before joining Vienna, I received my BSc and MSc in Applied Mathematics and Physics at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT), where I first pursued research on regularizations and simulation models for the PageRank problem under the supervision of Prof. Boris Polyak.
As for my professional experience, I served as a Research Scholar at the Risk, Policy and Vulnerability program at IIASA (Vienna, Austria), pursuing research on natural disaster risk management. As recipient of a Schrödinger Fellowship of the Austrian Science Fund, I subsequently conducted research at EPFL's Risk, Analytics and Optimization Department and at the University of Vienna. From 2018 to 2024 I was a Scientific Researcher at EPFL's Chair of Technology and Operations Management (TOM), and in April 2024 I joined IMD as Research Professor.
I received several awards for the quality of my research: Enable Grant (2023), E4S Grant (2022), University of Vienna Publication Award (2017), Schrödinger Fellowship (2015), Best Student Paper Prize at CMS (2013), and IIASA's Mikhalevich Award (2011).
My goal is to work on both interesting and challenging projects, and I am always looking for new ways to become a better scientist.