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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.

Faculty

	Pankaj Agarwal Research Interests: Computational & discrete geometry, Shape analysis, GIS and ecologic modeling, Spatial databases, Sensor networks, Trajectory data analysis		Brandon Fain Research Interests: Fair resource allocation, Algorithmic game theory, Computational social choice.		Rong Ge Research Interests: Algorithms, machine learning, matrix/tensor decompositions, optimization.		Kamesh Munagala Research Interests: Approximation and Online algorithms, Stochastic optimization, Decision theory, Scheduling theory, Computational Economics and Algorithmic mechanism design.
	Debmalya Panigrahi Research Interests: Graph algorithms, Online and approximation algorithms, Combinatorial optimization, Applied algorithms		John H. Reif Research Interests: Biomolecular Computing and Self Assembly of DNA Nanostructures, Algorithms, Quantum computing, Optical computing		Benjamin Rossman Research Interests: Complexity Theory, Circuit Complexity, Finite Model Theory, Combinatorics		Alex Steiger Research Interests: Computational Geometry, Graph Algorithms

Affiliated Faculty

	Bruce Donald Primary Area: Artificial Intelligence Research Interests: Computational biology, chemistry and biophysics, Protein modeling, Optimization, Game theory for pathogen resistance, Statistical mechanics, and Geometric computing		Robert Calderbank Primary Area: Coding Theory Research Interests: Error correcting codes, Combinatorics, Electrical Engineering		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		Bruce Maggs Primary Area: Systems Research Interests: Distributed systems, including content delivery networks, computer networks, and computer and network security.		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, Stochastic modeling, Bioinformatics, Machine learning, and Statistical computing		Fan Wei Primary Area: Mathematics Research Interests: Extremal combinatorics, probabilistic combinatorics, applications of combinatorics to computer science.

Graduate Students

Current PhD Students

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

Recent Alumni

Postdocs

• Xiao Hu, 2022 (Assistant Professor at University of Waterloo)
• Anilesh Krishnaswamy, 2021 (Google)
• Hsien-Chih Chang, 2020 (Assistant Professor at Dartmouth College)
• Yu Cheng, 2019 (Assistant Professor at UIC).
• Kyle Fox, 2017 (Associate Professor at UT Dallas)
• Sungjin Im, 2013 (Associate Professor at UC Merced)
• Thomas Moelhave, 2013 (Scalable Algorithmics)
• Swaminathan Sankaraman, 2013 (Akamai Technologies)

PhDs

• Chenwei Wu, 2023 (Huawei)
• Erin Taylor, 2023 (Geometric Data Analytics)
• Alexander Steiger, 2023 (Assistant 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 (Esri)
• 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 The University of Waterloo)
• Abhinandan Nath, 2018 (Mentor Graphics)
• Tianqi Song, 2018 (Postdoc at Caltech)
• Hieu Bui, 2017 (U.S. Naval Research Laboratory -> Assistant Professor at The Catholic University of America)
• Sudhanshu Garg, 2016 (LinkedIn)
• Jiangwei Pan, 2016 (Facebook -> Netflix)
• Janardhan Kulkarni, 2015 (Postdoc at Microsoft Research, Redmond -> Principle Researcher at Microsoft)
• Salman Parsa, 2015 (Postdoc at ENS Paris -> Postdoc at IPM, SUT -> Postdoc at SLU -> Postdoc at Utah -> Assistant Professor at DePaul University)
• You Wu, 2015 (Google Research)
• Xiaoming Xu, 2015 (Lifecode -> Google)
• Wuzhou Zhang, 2015 (Apple)
• Albert Yu, 2013 (Amazon)
• Sharath Raghvendra, 2012 (Postdoc at Stanford -> Associate Professor at Virginia Tech)
• Sayan Bhattacharya, 2012 (Postdoc at MPI Saarbrucken -> Assistant Professor at IMSc, Chennai -> Associate Professor at University of Warwick)
• Harish Chandran, 2012 (Google)
• Nikhil Gopalkrishnan, 2012 (Postdoc at Harvard -> 3EO Health)
• Shashidhara K. Ganjugunte, 2011 (Mentor Graphics)

Undergraduates

• William He, 2022 (PhD student at CMU)
• Ivan-Aleksandar Mavrov, 2023 (PhD student at Stanford)
• Zeyu Shen, 2023 (PhD student at Cornell)
• Haofeng (Fred) Zhang, 2018 (PhD at Harvard -> PhD student at UC Berkeley)
• Arun Ganesh, 2017 (PhD at UC Berkeley -> Google Research)
• Rex Ying, 2016 (PhD at Stanford -> Assistant Professor at Yale)
• William Victor, 2016 (Applied Predictive Technologies)
• Niel Lebeck, 2014 (PhD at UW Seattle -> Google)
• Ben Berg, 2013 (PhD student at CMU -> UNC-Chapel Hill)
• Siyang Chen, 2012 (Google)
• Peng Shi, 2010 (PhD student at MIT -> Microsoft Research -> Assistant Professor at USC Marshall School of Business)