Conference: The Midwest Optimization Meeting 2026

The 2026 Midwest Optimization Meeting takes place on October 30–31, 2026 and is hosted by South Dakota State University. The conference will bring together researchers, graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, and early-career faculty to exchange ideas and build collaborations in optimization and related areas of applied mathematics. Founded in 1997, the meeting serves as a key regional forum for education, professional development, and scientific exchange, particularly for graduate students and early-career researchers. The 2026 conference will provide travel support for students, postdoctoral scholars, and junior researchers, broadening access for participants from institutions of varying sizes, including those in rural and geographically isolated regions. The conference will strengthen professional networks, foster cross-institutional collaboration, and contribute to workforce development in fields advancing science, engineering, data science, and artificial intelligence. The event will be open to anyone interested in the conference themes. The conference aims to address recent advances in optimization, optimal control, and variational analysis, with topics including nonsmooth optimization and generalized differentiation, partial differential equation constrained optimization, stochastic and nonconvex optimization, computational mathematics, and emerging applications in statistics, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and data science. The conference will serve as a platform to disseminate new research findings, promote interaction among researchers at all career stages, initiate new collaborations, and provide students and early-career researchers with the opportunity to present their work and receive feedback from experts. The conference will include plenary lectures by leading researchers, contributed talks, panel discussions, and structured networking activities that facilitate scientific exchange within the optimization community. Conference details, including registration, travel information, and the program schedule are available at https://www.sdstate.edu/mathematics-statistics/2026-annual-midwest-optimization-meeting This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.