David Steurer is an assistant professor in the department of computer science at Cornell University. Steurer received his Ph.D. from Princeton University and was a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft Research New England for two years before joining Cornell University. He is the recipient of the 2010 FOCS Best Paper Award, the 2011 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award Honorable Mention, an NSF CAREER Award and an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship.
He investigates the power and limitations of efficient algorithms for optimization problems that are at the heart of computer science and its applications. A focus of his work has been the unique games conjectures whose resolution — no matter in which direction — promises new insights into the capabilities of efficient algorithms. As part of an approach to resolve this conjecture, Steurer studies provable guarantees of the sum-of-squares method, a compelling meta-algorithm that applies to a wide-range of problems and has the potential to unify the design of efficient algorithms for difficult optimization problems.