Santosh Vempala

Santosh Vempala (born 18 October 1971) is a prominent computer scientist. He is a Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His main work has been in the area of Theoretical Computer Science.

Vempala attended Carnegie Mellon University, where he received his 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.

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.

In 2008, he co-founded the Computing for Good (C4G) program at Georgia Tech.

Vempala has received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, Sloan Fellowship, and being listed inGeorgia Trend's 40 under 40. He was named Fellow of ACM "For contributions to algorithms for convex sets and probability distributions" in 2015.