Rate My Professor Tom Gur

Professor Tom Gur is a Professor of Computer Science in the Department of Computer Science and Technology at the University of Cambridge, where he joined in August 2023. He is a member of the Algorithms and Complexity Group and the Quantum Computing Group, and is affiliated with the Centre for Quantum Information and Foundations in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics. His research lies in theoretical computer science, with a focus on complexity theory and quantum computing. Key interests include sublinear algorithms and property testing, cryptography and zero-knowledge proofs, probabilistically checkable proofs, locally testable and locally decodable codes, computational learning theory, structure-versus-randomness and local-to-global phenomena, as well as harmonic analysis and additive combinatorics in theoretical computer science. Gur teaches Complexity Theory for Part IB students and Quantum Complexity Theory for Part II/III/MPhil students.

Gur received his PhD in 2017 from the Weizmann Institute of Science, where his thesis 'On Locally Verifiable Proofs of Proximity' was supervised by Oded Goldreich. Prior to Cambridge, he served as Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Warwick. In 2024, he was awarded an ERC Starting Grant worth €1.5 million for his project 'Designing fundamentally new sublinear quantum algorithms,' aimed at developing mathematical tools to enhance quantum algorithms for massive datasets and pioneering new quantum computation notions inspired by harmonic analysis and additive combinatorics. His research is further supported by UKRI, ARIA, and EPSRC. Notable publications include 'Worst-Case to Average-Case Reductions via Additive Combinatorics' (with V. R. Asadi, A. Golovnev, I. Shinkar; STOC 2022), 'Hypercontractivity on High Dimensional Expanders' (with N. Lifshitz, S. Liu; STOC 2022), 'Quantum Worst-Case to Average-Case Reductions for All Linear Problems' (with V. R. Asadi, A. Golovnev, I. Shinkar, S. Subramanian; QIP 2023), 'A Zero-Knowledge PCP Theorem' (with J. O'Connor, N. Spooner; STOC 2025), 'Quantum Communication Advantage in TFNP' (with M. Göös, S. Jain, J. Li; STOC 2025), and 'Perfect Zero-Knowledge PCPs for #P' (with J. O'Connor, N. Spooner; STOC 2024). Gur holds editorial positions including SIAM Journal on Computing (2026-present) and Quantum (2022-present), serves as Associate Editor-in-Chief of the Chicago Journal of Theoretical Computer Science (2023-present), and has chaired program committees for RANDOM 2026, STOC 2026, and others. He also leads diversity and inclusivity efforts for CCC (2022-present) and STOC (2021-present).