About

Santosh Vempala is an adjunct professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering and is the Frederick G. Storey Chair II and Professor in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech.

Dr. Vempala joined the College of Computing in the fall of 2006 as a professor in the Computing Science and Systems division. He recently spearheaded the Algorithms and Randomness Center and ThinkTank at Georgia Tech, and currently serves as director. 

His main work has been in the area of theoretical computer science, with particular activity in the fields of algorithms, randomized algorithms, computational geometry, and computational learning theory, including the authorship of books on random projection and spectral methods.

Dr. Vempala graduated from Carnegie Mellon University with a Ph.D. in 1997 under professor Avrim Blum. In 1997, he was awarded a Miller Fellowship at Berkeley. Subsequently, he was a Professor at MIT in the Mathematics Department, until he moved to Georgia Tech in 2006. He has received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, Sloan Fellowship, and being listed in Georgia Trend's 40 under 40. He continues to get unreasonably excited when a phenomenon that appears complex from one perspective, turns out to be simple from another.