Pranjal Dutta (প্রাঞ্জল দত্ত)

“What matters most is how well you walk through the fire.”

― Charles Bukowski (1920-1994)

Connect with me through twitter, likedin. Email: pranjal.dutta@ntu.edu.sg

Main Research Interests:

Theoretical Computer Science, especially Computational Complexity Theory, and Computational Algebra.

Review Request:

My review queue currently (February 2026) has 2 journal paper(s) and 0 conference paper(s). If you see numbers that add up to more than 3 above, please consider not sending review requests.

I am an Assistant Professor in the College of Computing and Data Science (CCDS) at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) Singapore since July 2025. I spent Fall 2025 as a Jane Street Fellow at the Simons Institute, UC Berkeley in the program on Complexity and Linear Algebra.

Before joining NTU, I was a Research Fellow (Postdoc) hosted by Prof. Divesh Aggarwal, at the School of Computing, NUS, funded by the National Research Foundation (NRF) Singapore from January 2023 - June 2025. I finished my Ph.D. (2018 - 2022) in Computer Science from CMI, where I was fortunate to be advised by Prof. Nitin Saxena (IIT Kanpur). During my PhD, I was supported by Google PhD Fellowship (2018 -2022), and was a Visiting Research Fellow at IIT Kanpur. My PhD thesis won the ACM India Doctoral Dissertation Award 2023. I obtained my master's degree in computer science (2016-18) and bachelor's degree in mathematics and computer science (2013-16) from CMI.

Here is my CV (updated in January 2026). Check my DBLP here.

My Erdős number is 3 (Paul Erdős -> Noga Alon -> Sourav Chakraborty -> P.D.).

News:

April 2026: Received Global Research Excellence Award for Travel (GREAT).

February 2026: Two papers accepted in the journal Theory of Computing (ToC).

November 2025: [Invited by the editor] Our survey on derbordering [pdf] got accepted in the Texts and Monographs in Symbolic Computation (TMSC).

September 2025: Spending Fall 2025 at the Simons Institute, UC Berkeley as a Jane Street Fellow (see details).

What drives my research: My research lies broadly in theoretical computer science, with emphasis on algebraic complexity, algebraic algorithms, derandomization, probabilistic circuit models, and fine-grained complexity. I am interested in both algorithmic and structural questions: designing efficient algorithms for algebraic and combinatorial problems, understanding the role of randomness in computation, studying reconstruction and learning questions for structured probabilistic models, and proving lower bounds that clarify the limits of efficient computation.