Venkatesan Guruswami

Venkatesan Guruswami is interim director at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing and chancellor's professor at UC Berkeley, with appointments in EECS and Mathematics. Venkat received his Bachelor's degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, in 1997, and his Ph.D. from MIT in 2001. He was a Miller Research Fellow at UC Berkeley and held faculty positions in Computer Science at the University of Washington and Carnegie Mellon University, prior to moving to his current position in January 2022.

Venkat's research interests span many areas of theoretical computer science and related mathematics, including coding theory, approximate optimization, randomness in computing, and computational complexity. 

Venkat has served the theory community in several leadership roles. He is the current Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the ACM, and was previously Editor-in-Chief of the ACM Transactions on Computation Theory. He was program committee chair for CCC (2012), FOCS (2015), and ISIT (2018, co-chair), and recently president of the Computational Complexity Foundation.

Venkat is a recipient of a Simons Investigator award, the Presburger Award, Packard and Sloan Fellowships, the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award, and an IEEE Information Theory Society Paper Award. He is a fellow of the ACM, AMS, and IEEE.