Tyler Hanks and Luke Morris receive their PhDs

Tyler Hanks and Luke Morris were both hooded in May 2026, the first two PhDs conferred out of the GATAS Lab. Both started in 2021, in CISE.

Tyler’s work is on the optimization and control side: compositional convex optimization, and a categorical framework for multistage control problems that became Modeling Model Predictive Control at ACC 2024. His thesis runs through coordination sheaves, which are used to assemble a control problem out of parts while still saying something about the whole.

Luke leads development of CombinatorialSpaces.jl and Decapodes.jl, the lab’s discrete exterior calculus stack. That is the machinery underneath the Decapodes project, where physics is written as diagrams, composed as diagrams, and compiled into a simulation.

Photos