“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
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Main Research Interests:
Theoretical Computer Science, especially Computational Complexity Theory, and Computational Algebra.
Review Request:
Serving as one of the PC Members at COCOON 2026!
My review queue currently (May 2026) has 2 journal paper(s) and 1 conference paper(s). If you see numbers that add up to more than 3 above, please consider not sending review requests.
I am a Nanyang Assistant Professor in the College of Computing and Data Science (CCDS) at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) Singapore. I am also an NTU Honours College (NHC) Faculty Fellow. I spent Fall 2025 as a Jane Street Fellow at the Simons Institute, UC Berkeley in the program on Complexity and Linear Algebra.
Before Simons, 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 2023 - 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 July 2026). Check my DBLP here.
My Erdős number is 3 (Paul Erdős -> Noga Alon -> Sourav Chakraborty -> P.D.).
News:
July 2026: Paper accepted in FOCS 2026 (IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science).
May 2026: Paper accepted in ICML 2026 (International Conference on Machine Learning).
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: I am interested in a simple question:
why are some computational problems harder than others?
If the best method we know uses a billion operations, are all those operations really necessary—or have we simply not yet found a method that uses only a thousand!? I look for mathematical answers: sometimes by designing faster algorithms, and sometimes by showing that certain shortcuts cannot exist. Along the way, I use ideas from algebra, randomness, and probability, and I also ask how much we can learn about a complicated distribution from surprisingly little information.
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