Sofya Raskhodnikova

Sofya Raskhodnikova is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Boston University, part of the College of Arts and Sciences. She holds a Ph.D. from MIT and has held positions at Penn State University and postdoctoral fellowships at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Weizmann Institute of Science. Her research focuses on sublinear-time algorithms, data privacy, approximation algorithms, and complexity theory. She is a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award and has contributed significantly to the theoretical foundations of privacy-preserving computation and algorithm design.

Education: Ph.D. in Computer Science from MIT (2003), postdoctoral research at Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Weizmann Institute of Science (2003–2006). Visiting positions at UCLA, Harvard University, and the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing.

Research Interests: Sofya’s work bridges theoretical computer science and practical applications, emphasizing algorithms that operate efficiently on large datasets. Key areas include property testing (e.g., monotonicity, sortedness), differential privacy, and sublinear-time algorithms. She explores how algorithms can analyze data while preserving privacy guarantees and minimizing computational resources.

Publications: Over 50 peer-reviewed articles in top venues such as STOC, FOCS, and SODA, with recent contributions focusing on dynamic graph algorithms under privacy constraints and robust property testing against adversarial noise.

Professional Activities: Editor for ACM Transactions on Computation Theory and Algorithmica; program committee chair for WOLA 2021 and CSR 2022; active in mentoring initiatives like Sigma Camp and Artemis.

Advising & Students: Current advisees include Ephraim Linder and Debanuj Nayak. Notable alumni include Iden Kalemaj (Meta Research) and Nithin Varma (Max Planck Institute). She has supervised over 15 Ph.D. students and postdocs, fostering a collaborative research environment.