Umesh Vazirani

Research Director for Quantum Computing, Simons Institute, UC Berkeley

Umesh V. Vazirani is a Research Director for Quantum Computing Simons Institute, and the Roger A. Strauch Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley, and the director of the Berkeley Quantum Computation Center. He received his BTech in Computer Science from MIT in 1981 and his PhD in Computer Science from Berkeley in 1985. Vazirani's research interests include computational learning theory, combinatorial algorithms, computational complexity theory and quantum computing. He received the 2012 Fulkerson Prize (with Sanjeev Arora and Satish Rao) for his work on approximation algorithms for sparsest cut.

Program Visits

Special Year on Large Language Models and Transformers: Part 2, Spring 2025, Visiting Scientist and Program Organizer
Special Year on Large Language Models and Transformers: Part 1, Fall 2024, Visiting Scientist and Program Organizer
Quantum Algorithms, Complexity, and Fault Tolerance, Spring 2024, Visiting Scientist and Program Organizer
Summer Cluster on Quantum Computing, Summer 2023, Visiting Scientist and Program Organizer
Summer Cluster: Lattices and Beyond, Summer 2022, Visiting Scientist
Extended Reunion: The Quantum Wave in Computing, Summer 2022, Visiting Scientist
Geometric Methods in Optimization and Sampling, Fall 2021, Visiting Scientist
Summer Cluster in Quantum Computation, Summer 2021, Visiting Scientist
The Quantum Wave in Computing, Spring 2020, Visiting Scientist and Program Organizer
Lower Bounds in Computational Complexity, Fall 2018, Visiting Scientist
Summer Cluster: Challenges in Quantum Computation, Summer 2018, Visiting Scientist and Program Organizer
Quantum Hamiltonian Complexity, Spring 2014, Visiting Scientist