Thatchaphol Saranurak recognized with 2023 Presburger Award

Thatchaphol Saranurak, assistant professor of computer science at the University of Michigan, has been selected as the recipient of the Presburger Award for 2023 in recognition of his exceptional contributions to the field of theoretical computer science.

The Presburger Award is awarded by the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS) to a young scientist for outstanding contributions in theoretical computer science, documented by a published paper or a series of published papers. The award is named after Mojżesz Presburger, who accomplished his path-breaking work on decidability of the theory of addition (which today is called Presburger arithmetic) as a student in 1929.

Saranurak’s research interests are in efficient graph algorithms with a focus on dynamic, local, and distributed models. He and his students are currently conducting research on problems related to fast graph algorithms in different models of computation, robust algorithms against an adaptive adversary, and continuous optimization for combinatorial problems.

Earlier this year, Saranurak received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award to solve open problems in graph theory by studying their interconnections. The title of this project is “Theory for Dynamic Graph Algorithms.”

Also this year, Saranurak and his collaborators received a Best Paper Award at the leading algorithms conference, the ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA ’23), for combining insights from streaming and sublinear-time algorithms to obtain a surprising result in dynamic algorithms, breaking a long-standing barrier on a central problem of the area.

Saranurak received his PhD in Computer Science from the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, in 2018. He joined the faculty at Michigan in 2021.