I am an assistant professor in the Johns Hopkins Department of Applied Math and Statistics. I am an optimizer. I work on the design and analysis of algorithms for continuous optimization problems beyond the areas where classical theory applies. For example, the selected works below all address foundational issues in optimization theory, growing the foundations for classical approaches to be minimax optimal (and beyond) and handle modern issues arising in stochastic / nonconvex / nonsmooth / nonLipschitz / adversarial problems. Lately, I have found a particular interest in computer-aided design and analysis of optimization methods (a fun meta-type problem, having the computer optimize the algorithms that we use for optimization).
My work is currently supported by AFOSR and a Sloan Fellowship. Previously, I was supported by an NSF fellowship during my PhD in Operations Research at Cornell, advised by Jim Renegar and Damek Davis. During my time in grad school, I was privileged to spend Spring 2020 with Google Research working on adversarial optimization and Fall 2017 at UC Berkeley as part of a Simons Institute program bridging continuous and discrete optimization.
Office: N419 Wyman Hall
Email: grimmer at jhu.edu
CV: here
Twitter: @prof_grimmer (mostly sharing pretty 3D prints)
Selected Recent Papers
| Beyond Minimax Optimality: A Subgame Perfect Gradient Method | Talk Recording, arXiv |
| Benjamin Grimmer, Kevin Shu, Alex L. Wang. |
| Composing Optimized Stepsize Schedules for Gradient Descent | arXiv |
| Benjamin Grimmer, Kevin Shu, Alex L. Wang. |
| Performance Estimation For Smooth and Strongly Convex Sets | Slides, arXiv |
| Alan Luner, Benjamin Grimmer. |
| Some Primal-Dual Theory for Subgradient Methods for Strongly Convex Optimization | Mathematical Programming, 2025 |
| Benjamin Grimmer, Danlin Li. | arXiv |
My Research Group
| Ning Liu (PhD Candidate) | Johns Hopkins, AMS |
| Thabo Samakhoana (PhD Candidate) | Johns Hopkins, AMS |
| Alan Luner (PhD Candidate) | Johns Hopkins, AMS |
| Yue Wu (PhD Candidate) | Johns Hopkins, AMS |
| Aaron Zoll (PhD Student) | Johns Hopkins, AMS |
| Shengyi Yan (PhD Student) | Johns Hopkins, AMS |
| Raj Gosain (Undergraduate) | Johns Hopkins, AMS |
| Raymond Gong (Undergraduate) | Johns Hopkins, AMS |