Sushil Varma 2024 SIGMETRICS Doctoral Dissertation Award
ACM SIGMETRICS is pleased to announce the selection of Dr. Sushil Varma of INRIA Paris as the recipient of the 2024 SIGMETRICS Doctoral Dissertation Award in recognition of his fundamental contributions to the emerging area of Stochastic Matching Networks, spanning the entire spectrum starting from laying the theoretical foundation and using it in various applications such as online platforms, payment channel networks, supply chains, and data center networks.
Sushil is a postdoctoral fellow at INRIA Paris. He will join the Industrial and Operations Engineering (IOE) Department at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, starting in Fall 2025. He obtained his Ph.D. at ISyE Georgia Tech, where he was advised by Prof. Siva Theja Maguluri. Before that, he completed his B.Tech in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. His work has been recognized by awards at IFIP Performance and INFORMS.
Sushil’s thesis, Stochastic Matching Networks: Theory and Applications to Matching Platforms, makes foundational contributions to the area of resource allocation, focusing on scheduling, load balancing, and pricing, particularly through the study of Stochastic Processing and Matching Networks. Sushil’s work breaks new ground by examining two-sided or matching queues, where both servers and customers arrive over time. He has advanced the understanding of the heavy-traffic behavior of these queues, introducing new theoretical results that shed light on fundamental dynamics, such as phase transitions in queue behavior under various conditions. In addition to laying the foundations of the theory of Stochastic Matching Networks, he has also used them to model various real-world systems, including ride-hailing, electric vehicles (EVs), and payment channel networks, in addition to classical applications such as load balancing.
Additional information is available on Sushil's website: https://sites.google.com/view/sushil-varma/home.