Wes Gurnee

Wes Gurnee

PhD Student

MIT

Biography

I am a second year PhD student in Operations Research at the MIT ORC advised by Dimitris Bertsimas studying large-scale optimization, broadly applied. I am especially interested in analyzing and reducing existential risks emanating from emerging technologies (especially AI and biotech). In the past, I have done research on dynamical systems modeling, fair algorithms for congressional redistricting, and natural language processing.

Outside of work and research, I enjoy exercising, reading, and playing the guitar.

Interests

  • Optimization
  • AI Safety
  • Civilizational Resilience
  • Governance

Education

  • PhD in Operations Research, 2026

    Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  • BS in Computer Science, 2020

    Cornell University

Research

Quickly discover relevant content by filtering publications.
(2022). Learning Sparse Nonlinear Dynamics via Mixed-Integer Optimization. Under Review.

Preprint Code

(2021). Combatting Gerrymandering with Social Choice: the Design of Multi-member Districts. Under Review.

Preprint

(2019). Neural Open Information Extraction with Transformers. Technical Report.

PDF Code

Experience

 
 
 
 
 

Software Engineer

Google

Aug 2020 – Aug 2021
Engineer on the Storage Efficiency team. Working on building a canonical source for storage fleet telemetry data.
 
 
 
 
 

Executive Director

Fairmandering

Jun 2020 – Present
Founder and executive director of Fairmandering, an organization focused on data driven redistricting reforms.