In 2014, El Houcine obtained a PhD from the Institut National Polytechnique de Toulouse (INPT) on “numerical methods for least squares problems with application in data assimilation”. From September 2015 until January 2018, he was a research fellow at the National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and the Environment (INRAE). Since January 2018, he is a researcher at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST).His research work is focused on numerical optimization and its applications, including algorithms, machine learning, probability and operations research. Recently, he is particularly interested in large-scale optimization algorithms, including randomized and distributed algorithms.