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About Christopher
Christopher Umans is a Professor of Computer Science in the Department of Computing and Mathematical Sciences at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), where he holds the William M. Coughran Jr. Leadership Chair and serves as Executive Officer for Computing and Mathematical Sciences. He is a member of the Theory Group and contributes to Information Science and Technology programs. Umans earned a B.A. in Computer Science and Mathematics from Williams College in 1996 and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2000. Following his Ph.D., he spent two years as a postdoctoral researcher in the Theory Group at Microsoft Research before joining Caltech as an Assistant Professor in 2002. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 2008 and to Professor in 2010, and he served as Division Deputy Chair from 2018 to 2020.
Umans specializes in theoretical computer science, especially computational complexity. He pursues problems with an algebraic flavor, which lead to investigations in derandomization, explicit combinatorial constructions, algebraic algorithms, coding theory, hardness of approximation, and randomness in computation. His influential work includes establishing new upper bounds for matrix multiplication complexity using group-theoretic approaches and developing novel algorithms for polynomial factorization and fast generalized discrete Fourier transforms over finite groups. Umans has received the Northrop Grumman Prize for Excellence in Teaching in 2017 and was named a Simons Investigator in Computer Science in 2015. He currently teaches courses such as Complexity Theory (CS 151), Decidability and Tractability (CS/IDS 21), and Current Topics in Theoretical Computer Science (CS/IDS 153).
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