Meet Kimberly Villalobos Carballo, one of the Department of Technology and Management’s newest faculty members

Reading Kimberly Villalobos Carballo’s curriculum vitae, it is easy to discern just how accomplished she is. There are, of course, the degrees from MIT: a B.S. in Mathematics and one in Computer Science, both with perfect GPAs, and the Ph.D. in Operations Research, awarded in 2024. There’s the list of publications on such topics as multimodal AI for healthcare, data-driven responses to COVID-19, and holistic deep learning. There are the Pierskalla Best Paper Award from INFORMS, the largest professional association in the field of decision and data sciences, and the honorable mention in the group’s "Doing Good with Good OR" competition.

Not evident, however, are the roadblocks Villalobos overcame on her way to a tenure-track position at NYU Tandon and the perseverance, work ethic, and focus it took to reach this point.

A native of Costa Rica, she hails from a family that, while loving, contained few scholarly role models: none had gone to college, she explains. Still, she possessed a marked talent for mathematics, and when she reached middle school, she was tapped as the first-ever female member of Costa Rica’s national team for the International Math Olympiads (IMO). She garnered a string of bronze medals in such competitions as the Iberoamerican Mathematical Olympiad and Asian Pacific Mathematics Olympiad, but studying for and participating in the competitions made it difficult to adhere to a traditional high school schedule, so she instead completed her diploma at one of Costa Rica’s Colegios Nocturnos (night schools) — set up to serve those unable to function in more traditional settings, such as adult workers and teenage parents.

It was not a setting in which she could thrive, but Villalobos had big dreams nonetheless. At Olympiads, she met students from all over the world, many of whom aimed to attend universities in the U.S. She began hearing schools mentioned, and with no real specific knowledge of any of them, she seized upon the idea of applying to MIT, one of the names she often heard bandied about.

With few English-language skills and a diploma from an admittedly unimpressive high school, Villalobos was unsurprised when her application was rejected, but she remained determined to try again after a gap year. She used that time to hone her English, and because international rules allow Olympians to compete during the year directly following their graduation, she worked to medal at the IMO — a feat she accomplished in 2014. (It is, to date, the only IMO medal won by a Costa Rican female competitor.)

MIT admissions officers were impressed, and in 2015, Villalobos traveled to Cambridge, Massachusetts, as a member of the Class of 2019. She remained at MIT for her doctoral studies, switching to Operations Research as a way to engage in work with practical, socially beneficial applications. Her thesis, completed under the supervision of Professor Dimitris Bertsimas, was titled “Integrating Optimization and Machine Learning: Theory, Computation and Healthcare Applications.”

She explains that while her focus has been on healthcare applications, such as finding algorithmic solutions to improving patient outcomes, she is also interested in applying her work to issues like alleviating poverty and leveraging AI for climate solutions.

While she earned money during her school years by tutoring everyone from kindergartners learning rudimentary addition to college students struggling with calculus, she acknowledges that she would have never managed without the generosity of people who believed in her. “I owe thanks to those in Costa Rica who paid for my food and travel expenses when I took part in Olympiads and to my peers there who first introduced me to the idea of studying in the U.S. I also need to thank everyone at MIT, which offered me a full scholarship.”

She is grateful, as well, to the mentors she has met along the way, and to NYU Tandon for providing her with a prestigious new academic home. “I hope to support and guide my students in a way that equips them with the tools, knowledge, and confidence they need to thrive in their careers,” she says. “I want them to know that it’s possible to achieve a lot no matter what challenges you might face.”