David Zuckerman

David Zuckerman is a Professor and Regents Chair in Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin. He received an A.B. in Mathematics from Harvard in 1987, where he was a Putnam Fellow, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from U.C. Berkeley in 1991. He did postdoctoral fellowships at MIT and Hebrew University, and has taken sabbaticals at U.C. Berkeley, Harvard, and the Institute for Advanced Study. His research focuses primarily in pseudorandomness and the role of randomness in computing. He is best known for his work on randomness extractors and their applications. His other research interests include computational complexity, coding theory, random walks, extremal combinatorics, and cryptography. His research awards include the 2025 Godel Prize, the 2024 NAS Held Prize, a 30-Year Test of Time Award at FOCS 2021, a Simons Investigator Award, a Best Paper Award at STOC 2016, ACM Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Packard Fellowship, a Sloan Research Fellowship, and an NSF Young Investigator Award.