About me

I am an Associate Professor in the Math Department at Western Michigan University. In 2013 I finished my Ph.D. in Algorithms, Combinatorics and Optimization  advised by Tom Bohman at Carnegie Mellon University. From 2013-15 I was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Toronto, supervised by Mike Molloy. Since 2015 I have been at WMU. 

Here is my CV.

Lake Michigan Workshop

The Lake Michigan Workshop is an annual event founded by Andrzej Dudek. I co-organized the 4th, 5th, 6th and 9th Workshops. The 10th Workshop will be in Chicago in 2025.

Research

My research is in probabilistic and extremal combinatorics. I specialize in the design and analysis of randomized combinatorial algorithms. Usually the goal is to prove the existence of some object with interesting properties (e.g. extremal properties) by arguing that it is the likely output of a random algorithm. Of course the challenge is to design an algorithm that performs well subject to the constraint that this algorithm must be possible to analyze rigorously.  

My preprints can be found on arXiv. 

My published papers can be found on MathSciNet.

Ph.D. Students

Ryan Cushman (graduated 2021)

Funding

Simons Foundation Collaboration Grant for Mathematicians (PI): 2016-21 and 2021-26

National Science Foundation Conference Grant (Co-PI): 2017, 2018, 2019

Faculty Research and Creative Activities Award (PI): 2018-19