Satish Rao

Satish Rao is a Professor in the Computer Science Division at the University of California, Berkeley. He is affiliated with the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing and the Center for the Theoretical Foundations of Learning, Inference, Information, Intelligence, Mathematics and Microeconomics at Berkeley (CLIMB). His research focuses on algorithms, combinatorial optimization, graph theory, and theoretical computer science with applications to computational biology and machine learning.

Rao has held teaching roles for courses such as CS 70 (Discrete Mathematics and Probability Theory) and CS 270 (Spring 2024). He has been recognized with prestigious awards including ACM Fellow (2013), the Delbert Ray Fulkerson Prize (2012), and the Okawa Research Grant (1999).

• Research Interests: Algorithm design, graph algorithms, combinatorial optimization, computational biology, and machine learning.
• Key Contributions: Pioneering work on metric embeddings, approximation algorithms, and network flow problems. Notable publications include foundational papers on tree metrics, distributed object location, and electrical flow-based optimization.

Rao’s work bridges theoretical computer science with practical applications, including contributions to phylogeny estimation, anomaly detection, and parallel computing frameworks like the BSP model.