Chris Umans

Chris Umans is a Professor of Computer Science in the Computing and Mathematical Sciences department at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), affiliated with the Theory Group. He earned his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 2000 and joined Caltech in 2002 after a postdoc at Microsoft Research. His research focuses on theoretical computer science, particularly computational complexity, including derandomization, algebraic complexity, and matrix multiplication algorithms.

Education: Ph.D. in Computer Science, UC Berkeley (2000); Postdoc, Microsoft Research (2000-2002). Research interests span computational complexity, explicit constructions, and hardness of approximation. His work often intersects algebraic methods and group theory to advance algorithm design, such as group-theoretic approaches to matrix multiplication.

Professional Activities: Program committee member for FOCS 2024, STOC, SODA, and others. Vice-Chair of SIGACT (2021-24). Editor for Theory of Computing (ToC), ACM Transactions on Computation Theory (TOCT), and Computational Complexity (CC). Member of the ECCC scientific board.

Research Trends: Recent articles explore fast matrix multiplication via matrix groups, algebraic problems over finite fields, and generalized DFTs for finite groups. His work bridges theoretical foundations with algorithmic innovations in algebraic structures.

Grants & Labs: His research is supported by NSF grants focused on algebraic methods in complexity theory. He advises students in theoretical computer science and has contributed to collaborative projects on computational algebra and combinatorics.