Daniele Catanzaro graduated summa cum laude in Computer Science Engineering at the University of Palermo, Italy, in 2003. In 2008, he was awarded a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Université Libre de Bruxelles for his researches in discrete optimization, network design, and computational phylogenetics, conducted at the Computer Science Department, the Institute of Biology and Molecular Medicine (IBMM), and the Hospital Erasme of the same university. Before joining the Université Catholique de Louvain in 2014, Daniele Catanzaro was a Chargé de Recherches of the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research (2009-2013), a Visiting Scholar at the Tepper School of Business and the Computational Biology Department of Carnegie Mellon University (2010-2012), and an Assistant Professor of Discrete Optimization at the Faculty of Economics and Business of the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen (2013-2014). In 2014, Daniele Catanzaro joined the Louvain School of Management, where he is currently serving as a Professor of Discrete Optimization and President of the Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE).
His research interests focus on discrete optimization, search algorithms, massive parallelism, and high performance computing. Specific optimization problems he worked on include: linear, nonlinear and uncertain network design problems, (versions of) the Steiner tree problem, coloring, covering, and partitioning problems, routing problems, (generalized versions of) the traveling salesman and the quadratic assignment problems, and nonlinear inverse problems. He is also particularly interested in specific topics from the area of data compression & encryption, bioinformatics(namely, the development of predictive models for tumorigenesis, genome-wide association studies), and in the combinatorics and computational aspects of molecular evolution and phylogenetics, with special focus on distance methods and balanced minimum evolution.
His research activities have been supported by the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research (FNRS), the LouvainFoundation, the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Belgian American Educational Foundation (BAEF), and the European Marie Curie Fellowship Program.
Daniele Catanzaro served as an Associate Editor for Soft Computing from 2021 to 2024 and as member of the program committee for ISCO 2024. At present he is panel member for the Canadian NSERC/CRSNG (calls 2022-2025) and expert for the ERC Horizon call HORIZON-MSCA-2024-PF-01.
