PhD Candidates

Hossein Reyhani Yamchi is a PhD researcher at La Trobe Business School, La Trobe University. His research focuses on global agricultural supply chains, with particular interests in trade and agricultural policy, policy uncertainty, and strategic decision-making. His previous research applies mixed-integer linear programming and multi-objective optimisation to sustainable agricultural supply chain design, incorporating economic, environmental, and social dimensions. His current PhD research draws on optimisation and game-theoretic approaches to study interactions between government policies and supply chain actors.

Robert is a PhD student at the University of Melbourne’s School of Computing and Information Systems. He previously graduated with a University Medal from the ANU holding a Bachelor of Advanced Computing (Research & Development) (Honours). His core research interests lie in the combination of evolutionary computation techniques and reinforcement learning methods. More specifically, he is exploring how novelty search and quality-diversity algorithms can be combined with world-model based reinforcement learning methods. He is supervised by Prof. Michael Kirley and Assoc. Prof. Nir Lipovetzky.

Xinda Zheng is a PhD candidate in the Department of Data Science and AI at Monash University, supervised by Dr. Edward Lam and Dr. Frits de Nijs. His research focuses on end-to-end prediction and optimisation, with a particular interest in developing neural methods for combinatorial optimisation that produce high-quality discrete decisions efficiently.