Bio

Santosh Vempala joined the College of Computing in the fall of 2006 as a professor of Computer Science. He helped set up the Algorithms and Randomness Center and ThinkTank at Georgia Tech, serving as its first director (2006--2011). Vempala's research interests include algorithms, randomness, geometry and computing-for-good (C4G). He graduated from CMU in 1997 being advised by Avrim Blum and then taught at MIT until 2006 except for a year as a Miller Fellow at UC Berkeley. Vempala is also a Sloan, Guggenheim, ACM and generally excitable Fellow, especially when a phenomenon that appears complex from one perspective, turns out to be simple from another. In recent years, he has been trying to understand, with little success, how the brain works and how to model its computational abilities.