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The theory group is engaged in cutting-edge research in a broad span of areas, including geometric computing, approximation and online algorithms, graph algorithms, game theory and mechanism design, stochastic optimization and decision theory, and combinatorial optimization. The group is also engaged in collaborative efforts with researchers in a broad array of application areas and makes leading contributions to nanotechnology systems, computational molecular biology, database management and data analysis, computational economics, internet systems and services, high-performance computing, geographic information systems (GIS), and ecological modeling.

In the news: We are 10th on a recent ranking of theory groups across the U.S. - click here for more.

Faculty

	Pankaj Agarwal Primary Area: Theoretical Computer Science Research Interests: Computational & discrete geometry, Shape analysis, GIS and ecologic modeling, Spatial databases, Sensor networks, Trajectory data analysis		Robert Calderbank Primary Area: Theoretical Computer Science Research Interests: Error correcting codes, Combinatorics, Electrical Engineering		Brandon Fain Primary Area: Theoretical Computer Science Research Interests: Fair resource allocation, Algorithmic game theory, Computational social choice.		Rong Ge Primary Area: Theoretical Computer Science Research Interests: Algorithms, machine learning, matrix/tensor decompositions, optimization.
	Debmalya Panigrahi Primary Area: Theoretical Computer Science Research Interests: Graph algorithms, Online and approximation algorithms, Combinatorial optimization, Applied algorithms		John H. Reif Primary Area: Theoretical Computer Science Research Interests: Biomolecular Computing and Self Assembly of DNA Nanostructures, Algorithms, Quantum computing, Optical computing		Benjamin Rossman Primary Area: Theoretical Computer Science Research Interests: Complexity Theory, Circuit Complexity, Finite Model Theory, Combinatorics		Kamesh Munagala Primary Area: Theoretical Computer Science Research Interests: Approximation and Online algorithms, Stochastic optimization, Decision theory, Scheduling theory, Computational economics and Algorithmic mechanism design, Data-driven modeling and analysis of social networks, Big-data processing and Query optimization

	Bruce Donald Primary Area: Artificial Intelligence Research Interests: Algorithms for structural molecular biology, Computational biology, Computational chemistry, Computational biophysics, Modeling of proteins and protein complexes, Optimization and search, Provably-good approximation algorithms, Computational geometry, Game theory for modeling pathogen resistance, Statistical mechanics, Computational topology, Geometric modeling and geometric computing		John Harer Primary Area: Mathematics Research Interests: Computational topology, Computational biology, Algorithms		Ashwin Machanavajjhala Primary Area: Systems Research Interests: Data privacy, Systems for massive data analytics, Statistical methods for information extraction and entity resolution
	Sayan Mukherjee Primary Area: Statistical Science Reseach Interests: Randomized algorithms in machine learning, Spectral theory for simplicial complexes, Computational topology		Scott Schmidler Primary Area: Statistical Science Research Interests: Monte Carlo algorithms, Markov chain mixing times, Randomized algorithms, Approximate integration and approximate counting, Computational complexity, Problems in computational statistics, Statistical physics, Computational biology, Phylogenetics, Shape analysis		Bruce Maggs Primary Area: Systems Research Interests: Distributed systems

Graduate Students

PhDs

• Ruoxu Cen
• Lu Wang
• Anish Hebbar
• Keegan Yao
• Rahul Raychaudhury
• Ben Holmgren
• Mo Zhou
• Muthu Chidambaram
• Ruoming Huang
• Govind S. Sankar
• Yiheng Shen

Recent Alumni

Postdocs

• Hsien-Chih Chang (Assistant Professor at Dartmouth College)
• Anilesh Krishnaswamy (Google)
• Xiao Hu (Assistant Professor at University of Waterloo)
• Yu Cheng, 2019 (Assistant Professor at UIC).
• Kyle Fox, 2017 (Assistant Professor at UT Dallas)
• Sungjin Im, 2013 (Assistant Professor at UC Merced)
• Thomas Moelhave, 2013 (Scalable Algorithmics)
• Swaminathan Sankaraman, 2013 (Akamai Technologies)

PhDs

• Chenwei Wu, 2023
• Erin Taylor, 2023 (Geometric Data Analytics)
• Alexander Steiger, 2023 (Assitant Research Professor at Duke University)
• Keerti Anand, 2022 (Goldman Sachs)
• Abraham Frandsen, 2022 (Enveda Biosciences)
• Kevin Sun, 2022 (Elon University -> Teaching Assistant Professor at UNC-Chapel Hill)
• Kangning Wang, 2022 (Postdoc at Stanford)
• Xiang Wang, 2022 (Research Scientist at Meta)
• Aaron Lowe, 2021
• Reza Alijani, 2020 (Google)
• Yuan Deng, 2020 (Google Research)
• Stavros Sintos, 2020 (Postdoc at UChicago -> Assistant Professor at UIC)
• Allen Xiao, 2020 (Robinhood)
• Brandon Fain, 2019 (Assistant Research Professor at Duke University)
• Samuel Haney, 2019 (Tumult Labs)
• Nathaniel Kell, 2018 (Assistant Professor at Denison University)
• Seyed Zahedi, 2018 (Assistant Professor at University of Waterloo)
• Abhinandan Nath, 2018 (Mentor Graphics)
• Tianqi Song, 2018 (Postdoc at Caltech)
• Hieu Bui, 2017 (U.S. Naval Research Laboratory)
• Sudhanshu Garg, 2016 (LinkedIn)
• Jiangwei Pan, 2016 (Facebook)
• Janardhan Kulkarni, 2015 (Postdoc at Microsoft Research, Redmond)
• Salman Parsa, 2015 (Postdoc at ENS Paris)
• You Wu, 2015 (Google)
• Xiaoming Xu, 2015 (Lifecode -> Google)
• Wuzhou Zhang, 2015 (Apple)
• Albert Yu, 2013 (Amazon)
• Sharath Raghvendra, 2012 (Postdoc at Stanford -> Assistant Professor at Virginia Tech)
• Sayan Bhattacharya, 2012 (Postdoc at MPI Saarbrucken -> Assistant Professor at IMSc, Chennai)
• Harish Chandran, 2012 (Google)
• Nikhil Gopalkrishnan, 2012 (Postdoc at Harvard)
• Shashidhara K. Ganjugunte, 2011 (Mentor Graphics)

Undergraduates

• William He, 2022 (PhD at CMU)
• Ivan-Aleksandar Mavrov, 2023 (PhD at Stanford)
• Zeyu Shen, 2023 (PhD at Cornell)
• Haofeng (Fred) Zhang, 2018 (PhD student at Harvard)
• Arun Ganesh, 2017 (PhD student at UC Berkeley)
• Rex Ying, 2016 (PhD student at Stanford)
• William Victor, 2016 (Applied Predictive Technologies)
• Niel Lebeck, 2014 (PhD student at UW Seattle)
• Ben Berg, 2013 (PhD at CMU)
• Siyang Chen, 2012 (Google)
• Peng Shi, 2010 (PhD student at MIT)