Samuel Pearson

About me: I am a first-year Mathematics PhD student at Instituto Superior Técnico - Universidade de Lisboa, advised by Prof. João Ribeiro. Previously, I completed my MSc and BSc in Applied Mathematics and Computation at Técnico. My master's thesis was focused on a cryptographic problem called Symmetric Private Information Retrieval. During this time, I was fortunate to be advised by Prof. João Ribeiro and Prof. Alex Davidson. I was also a teaching assistant in the Logic and Computation unit of Técnico's Mathematics Department during the 2024/25 academic year.

Research interests: I have a broad interest in Theoretical Computer science, with a special focus on information theory, coding theory, and cryptography. Currently, my research is mostly centred on information-theoretic aspects of communication channels with synchronisation errors.  Such errors include symbol insertions and deletions, as well as other sources of synchronisation loss arising in channel models for DNA-based data storage.