Govind M Chari

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I am a PhD student in the Autonomous Controls Lab at the University of Washington advised by Professor Behçet Açıkmeşe. My research focuses on optimization theory and high-performance implementations of optimization algorithms, and I am generally interested in computers and how to extract maximum performance from them.

I graduated summa cum laude from Cornell University in three years with a BS in Mechanical Engineering and received the Sibley Prize, awarded to the mechanical engineering graduate with the highest cumulative GPA.

I have completed three internships at SpaceX, where I worked on Raptor propulsion analysis, Dragon guidance, navigation, and control, and Starlink network topology. After that, I interned at Anduril on the guidance, navigation, and control team, focusing on trajectory optimization, then at Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs, where I worked with Dr. Arvind Raghunathan on optimization algorithms, and finally at Amazon as an Applied Scientist intern on the Supply Chain Optimization Technologies team.

selected publications

  1. Preprint
    Optimal Acceleration for Proximal Minimization of the Sum of Convex and Strongly Convex Functions
    Govind M. Chari, Uijeong Jang, Ernest K. Ryu, and Behçet Açıkmeşe
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.08593 2026
  2. Preprint
    QOCO-GPU: A Quadratic Objective Conic Optimizer with GPU Acceleration
    Govind M Chari, and Behçet Açıkmeşe
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.29197 2026
  3. MPC
    QOCO: a quadratic objective conic optimizer with custom solver generation
    Govind M. Chari, and Behçet Açıkmeşe
    Mathematical Programming Computation Mar 2026