Rate My Professor David Steurer

David Steurer is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at ETH Zurich, where he joined as Assistant Professor in 2017 and was promoted in 2020. He heads the Computational Complexity, Optimization, and Estimation Group as part of the Institute for Theoretical Computer Science. Previously, he served as Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University from 2012 to 2017, Postdoctoral Researcher at Microsoft Research New England from 2010 to 2012, and Visiting Assistant Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study from 2016 to 2017. Steurer received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Princeton University in 2010, advised by Sanjeev Arora, with the thesis "On the Complexity of Unique Games and Graph Expansion." He also holds an M.A. in Computer Science from Princeton University in 2008, as well as B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Computer Science from Saarland University in 2006.

Steurer's research in theoretical computer science centers on complexity theory, approximation algorithms, convex optimization, sum-of-squares hierarchies, robust estimation, clustering, tensor decomposition, and related problems in geometry and graph expansion. His influential publications include "Analytical Approach to Parallel Repetition" with I. Dinur (2014), "Graph Expansion and the Unique Games Conjecture" with P. Raghavendra (2010), "Hypercontractivity, Sum-of-Squares Proofs, and their Applications" with B. Barak et al. (2012), "Tensor Principal Component Analysis via Sum-of-Squares Proofs" with S.B. Hopkins and J. Shi (2015), and "The Power of Sum-of-Squares for Detecting Hidden Structures" with S.B. Hopkins et al. (2017). He has earned major awards such as the ERC Consolidator Grant (2019), Michael and Sheila Held Prize (2018, shared with P. Raghavendra), Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship (2014), NSF CAREER Award (2014), Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship (2014), STOC Best Paper Award (2015), FOCS Best Paper Award (2010), and ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award Honorable Mention (2011). Steurer has delivered invited talks at the International Congress of Mathematicians (2018), served as conference chair for APPROX 2018, and contributed to program committees for STOC, FOCS, COLT, and others, advancing algorithmic techniques for optimization and estimation challenges in computer science.