Faculty Leadership Team Update

Dear friends,

We’re writing with some exciting updates on our faculty leadership team. As of July 1, our friend and colleague Nikhil Srivastava is the Simons Institute’s Interim Associate Director. He succeeds Sampath Kannan, who returns to UPenn this fall, after two highly successful years as Associate Director of the Simons Institute. Taking Nikhil’s place as Senior Scientist is Berkeley Statistics and EECS faculty member Jason Lee. 

Nikhil is a Professor in the Department of Mathematics at UC Berkeley. He received his PhD in computer science from Yale in 2010. After postdocs at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), Princeton University, and MSRI (now SLMath), he spent two and a half years as a researcher at Microsoft Research India, before coming to Berkeley in 2015. He is currently interested in spectral graph theory, the geometry of polynomials, random matrices, and mathematical physics. He is a co-winner of SIAM’s Pólya Prize in Mathematics, the National Academy of Sciences’s Held Prize, and the American Mathematical Society’s Foias Prize. In the last year, Nikhil has been a co-organizer of First Proof, a project that evaluates the capacities of AI for research math. He has been the Simons Institute’s Senior Scientist since 2023.

Jason is an Associate Professor of Statistics and EECS at UC Berkeley whose current research focuses on the foundations of AI, deep learning, representation learning, and reinforcement learning. He joined the Berkeley faculty after having served as a Research Scientist at Google DeepMind, Member of the IAS, and Associate Professor at Princeton. He did a postdoc at Berkeley with Michael I. Jordan and holds a PhD from Stanford. He’s the recipient of the Samsung AI Researcher of the Year Award, NSF Career Award, ONR Young Investigator Award in Mathematical Data Science, Sloan Research Fellowship, and NeurIPS Best Student Paper Award, and was a finalist for the Best Paper Prize for Young Researchers in Continuous Optimization.

Please join us in thanking and congratulating Nikhil and Jason for taking on these important roles, and bidding a fond farewell to Sampath, whose ethos of innovation and simplicity has made its mark on our systems for years to come. 

Best wishes,
Venkat

Venkatesan Guruswami
Director, Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing