Welcome to the CS Theory Group at UC Santa Cruz!

We are a team of passionate CSE students, researchers, and faculty, working in theoretical computer science, algorithms, data mining, logic,
formal verification, theoretical machine learning, quantum computing, game theory and their intersections. We aim to cultivate a warm and welcoming community for TCS, where all of these research areas can benefit from one another.

If you are in the area and want to give a talk at our Theory seminar (or just stop by to say hi), feel free to contact us at vaggos@ucsc.edu.

Recent News

  • January 2025: Sungjin Im joins as new Theory Faculty.
  • February 2024: Six UCSC teams to be competing in the annual ICPC competition (Pacific Northwest), to be held in De Anza College.
  • January 2024: We have a new theory faculty position! Please check our job posting and apply!
  • November 2023: FOCS 2023 was held at Santa Cruz with great success! Thank you Alexandra for organizing!


Faculty


Luca de Alfaro (Professor)
Keywords: Formal Verification, Computational Ecology


Luca de Alfaro
Professor
Formal Verification, Logic,
Computational Ecology, Fairness in ML

Vaggos Chatziafratis, Assistant Professor

Vaggos Chatziafratis
Assistant Professor
Approximation Algorithms,
Foundations of Data Science, Machine Learning Theory

Daniel Fremont (Assistant Professor)

Daniel Fremont
Assistant Professor
Formal Methods, Reliable Systems, Algorithmic Improvisation

Sungjin Im

Sungjin Im
Associate Professor
Online Algorithms, Approximation Algorithms, ML, Database Theory

Alexandra Kolla

Alexandra Kolla
Assistant Professor
Spectral Graph Theory,
Statistical Physics, Quantum Computing

Yang Liu

Yang Liu
Assistant Professor
Data-centric and Trustworthy ML,
Large Language Models

John Musacchio

John Musacchio
Professor
Network Economics,
Game Theory,
Queuing networks

C. Seshadhri (Seshadhri Comandur)

C. Seshadhri
Professor
Sublinear Algorithms,
Foundations of Big Data,
Boolean Function Analysis

Alumni

Yatong Chen (PhD 2024) – Postdoc at Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Tübingen

Nicolas Menand (MS 2023) – PhD at UPenn

Kostas Zampetakis (PhD 2022) – Postdoc at University of Warwick

Noujan Pashanasangi (PhD 2021) – ML Engineer at Apple

Suman Kalyan Bera (Postdoc 2021) – Senior ML Engineer at Apple

Caleb Levy (Postdoc 2021) – Senior Software Engineer at Nuro

Andrew Stolman (PhD 2021) – Technical Lead at Katana Graph

Shweta Jain (PhD 2018) – Postdoc at University of Utah

Hadley Black (MS 2018) – Postdoc at UC San Diego, EnCORE Institute