Welcome! I’m a Ph.D. candidate in Industrial Engineering at Department of Industrial & Enterprise Systems Engineering and affiliated with Coordinated Science Laboratory, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. I am supervised by Associate Professor S. Rasoul Etesami. From August 2024 to January 2025, I was a visiting scholar at Engineering Systems and Design Pillar, Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD), hosted by Assistant Professor Antonios Varvitsiotis. Prior to these, I received B.Eng. in Civil Engineering (with First Class Honours) from The University of Hong Kong.

My research spans game theory, online learning, social networks, and optimal control. Specifically, my primary research interests lie in the equilibria of dynamic games, learning algorithm design for multi-agent systems, and online control in networks using the techniques from game theory, optimization, multi-armed bandits and reinforcement learning, with a focus on strategic resource allocation. I am also broadly interested in market design, distributed systems, networked control, inverse game theory, and their applications to cyber security, data privacy, traffic routing, and wireless communication.

I am on the 2025-26 postdoc job market!

Contact

E-mail: leon18 [at] illinois [dot] edu

Address: 1308 W Main St, CSL Building Rm 125, Urbana, IL 61801, USA

Education

Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, IL, USA, expected 2026

B.Eng. in Civil Engineering (First Class Honours), The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, 2016

Experience

Visiting Scholar, Engineering Systems and Design Pillar, Singapore University of Technology and Design, Aug 2024–Jan 2025

News and Updates

Recent and Upcoming News

• [Oct 2025] I presented my work “Online Learning for Dynamic Vickrey-Clarke-Groves Mechanism in Unknown Environments” (slides) in the Job Market Showcase track at 2025 INFORMS Annual Meeting in Atlanta, GA, USA.

Past Updates

• [Sep 2025] Our paper “Certifying Concavity and Monotonicity in Games via Sum-of-Squares Hierarchies” (joint work with Iosif Sakos, Ryann Sim, and Antonios Varvitsiotis) has been accepted to NeurIPS 2025! The article will be arXiv’ed soon, and see you in San Diego.
• [Apr 2025] I volunteered and presented my work “Online Learning for Dynamic Vickrey-Clarke-Groves Mechanism in Unknown Environments” (poster) at the 11th Midwest Workshop on Control and Game Theory, Urbana, IL.
• [Jan 2025] I finished my visiting scholar appointment with ESD, SUTD and moved back to the midwest!
• [Aug 2024] I started my visiting scholar appointment at ESD, SUTD and moved to the beautiful country of Singapore.
• [Dec 2023] I was invited to give a talk titled “Limited-Trust in Diffusion of Competing Alternatives Over Social Networks” at ESD, SUTD, Singapore.

Bio

Vincent Leon is a PhD candidate in Industrial Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, advised by Prof. Rasoul Etesami. His research spans game theory, online learning, social networks, and optimal control, with a focus on equilibrium analysis and learning algorithm design for dynamic games and multi-agent systems. He previously served as a visiting scholar at the Singapore University of Technology and Design and received his Bachelor’s degree with First Class Honours from The University of Hong Kong.