Selva Nadarajah

Selvaprabu ("Selva") Nadarajah is Professor and Head of Information and Decision Sciences at the University of Illinois Chicago College of Business Administration, where he holds the Bielinski Family Faculty Scholar and UIC Global Scholar distinctions. His research sits at the intersection of operations research and finance, developing methods for investment and operating decisions under uncertainty in energy systems, including generation and transmission planning, merchant energy trading, and renewable procurement. His current work centers on the computing and energy nexus: grid reliability under AI driven load growth, data center siting, and the resource constraints that accompany it, with support from Argonne National Laboratory, the Sloan Foundation, and Amazon Web Services. He leads a research group on infrastructure and decision intelligence for energy resilience, most recently coauthoring a position piece on AI for the grid and AI on the grid. He is an affiliate of the Institute of Government and Public Affairs, a nonpartisan policy research institute serving the state of Illinois, and previously served as Decision Intelligence R&D lead at the Discovery Partners Institute, the innovation hub of the University of Illinois System, which spans the Chicago, Urbana Champaign, and Springfield campuses. His work has appeared in Operations Research (OR), Management Science, Production and Operations Management (POM), and the Journal of Machine Learning Research. He serves as an Associate Editor at OR, POM, and Decision Sciences. His research has been recognized with the 2024 INFORMS Harvey J. Greenberg Award for Computing and Operations Research, the 2021 Best Paper Award from the Commodity and Energy Markets Association, the Best Overall Paper award at the 2020 NeurIPS Workshop on Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning, and the 2020 INFORMS Young Researcher Prize in energy, natural resources, and the environment.