Esteban Leiva

I am a PhD student in the Department of Industrial & Systems Engineering at the University of Southern California (USC).

I graduated from Universidad de Los Andes in 2025 with a Bachelor's degree in Mathematics and a Master's degree in Industrial Engineering (Operations Research). During this time, I also worked as a research assistant at the Center for Optimization and Applied Probability (COPA).

Contact: leivamon[at]usc.edu
Scholar  /  GitHub  /  ORCID

(Feel free to reach out, I reply fast!)

profile photo

Research

I enjoy working on problems that involve optimization (a rather broad umbrella, I’ll admit).

project image Apprenticeship learning with prior beliefs using inverse optimization
Mauricio Junca and Esteban Leiva
Accepted in Machine Learning, 2026   
arXiv / code /

A method for incorporating prior beliefs to apprenticeship learning using inverse optimization.
project image An Exact Method for Reliable Shortest Path Problems with Correlation
Esteban Leiva, Santiago Morales, Daniel Yamín, and Andrés L. Medaglia
Networks, 2026    (Runner up poster. OW2024 )
paper / code /

Extension of the pulse algorithm for reliable shortest path problems with correlation.

Open source projects

I have fun packaging code and uploading it to the internet. Here are some of my projects.

project image Python package: bezierv
Esteban Leiva
PyPi, 2025   
code / PyPI / documentation /

A Python package for Bézier distributions.