Erik Demaine's Academic Family

Co-authors

Current Students & Postdocs

Current postdocs:

• Markus Hecher

Current PhD students:

• Josh Brunner
• Lily Chung
• Jenny Diomidova
• Tim Gomez
• Della Hendrickson
• Rebecca Lin

Current Master's students:

Past Students & Postdocs

Past postdocs:

• Adam Hesterberg (2019—2020, now a Lecturer/Assistant Director Undergraduate Studies for Computer Science at Harvard)
• Jason Ku (2016–2017, now a Senior Lecturer at National University of Singapore)
• Christian Sommer (2011–2012, now at Apple)
• Siamak Tazari (2011)
• André Schulz (2009–2010, now a Professor at FernUniversität in Hagen)
• MohammadTaghi Hajiaghayi (joint with CMU, 2005–2007, now a Professor at University of Maryland)

Completed PhD students:

• Klara Mundilova
  Thesis: Gluing and Creasing Paper along Curves: Computational Methods for Analysis and Design (2023)
• Michael Coulombe
  Thesis: Games meet Concurrency: Algorithms and Hardness (2023)
• Quanquan Liu (cosupervised with Julian Shun, now a postdoc at Northwestern)
  Thesis: Scalable and Efficient Graph Algorithms and Analysis Techniques for Modern Machines (2021)
• Jayson Lynch (now a Research Scientist at MIT)
  Thesis: A Framework for Proving the Computational Intractability of Motion Planning Problems (2020)
• Jeffrey Bosboom
  Thesis: Exhaustive Search and Hardness Proofs for Games (2020)
• Ali Vakilian (cosupervised with Piotr Indyk, now a postdoc at U. Wisconsin Madison)
  Thesis: New Directions in Streaming Algorithms (2019)
• Hugo Akitaya (Tufts, cosupervised with Diane Souvaine, now an Assistant Professor at University of Massachusetts, Lowell)
  Thesis: Recognizing Weak Embeddings (2018)
• Adam Hesterberg (Math, now a Lecturer/Assistant Director Undergraduate Studies for Computer Science at Harvard)
  Thesis: Closed Quasigeodesics, Escaping from Polygons, and Conflict-Free Graph Coloring (2018)
• Zachary Abel (now a Lecturer in EECS at MIT)
  Thesis: On Folding and Unfolding with Linkages and Origami (2016)
• Jason Ku (MechE, cosupervised with Sanjay Sarma, now a Senior Lecturer at National University of Singapore)
  Thesis: On the Design of Physical Folded Structures (2016)
• Duks Koschitz (now an Associate Professor at Pratt)
  Thesis: Computational Design with Curved Creases: David Huffman's Approach to Paperfolding (2014)
• Andrew Winslow (Tufts, cosupervised with Diane Souvaine, now at YouTube)
  Thesis: Staged Self-Assembly and Polyomino Context-Free Grammars (2014)
• Morteza Zadimoghaddam (now at Google Boston)
  Thesis: Online Allocation Algorithms with Applications in Computational Advertising (2014)
• Nadia Benbernou (now at Google Boston)
  Thesis: Geometric Algorithms for Reconfigurable Structures (2011)
• Jelani Nelson (cosupervised with Piotr Indyk, now a Professor at Berkeley)
  Thesis: Sketching and Streaming High-Dimensional Vectors (2011, winner of MIT EECS Sprowls Award)
• Oren Weimann (now an Associate Professor at University of Haifa)
  Thesis: Accelerating Dynamic Programming (2009)
• Mihai Pătraşcu (now sadly deceased)
  Thesis: Lower Bound Techniques for Data Structures (2008)
• Dion Harmon (now at New England Complex Systems Institute)
  Thesis: New Bounds on Optimal Binary Search Trees (2006)
• Bob Hearn (cosupervised with Gerald Sussman)
  Thesis: Games, Puzzles, and Computation (2006)
• MohammadTaghi Hajiaghayi (Math, now a Professor at University of Maryland)
  Thesis: The Bidimensionality Theory and Its Algorithmic Applications (2005)
• Nicole Immorlica (cosupervised with David Karger, now a researcher at Microsoft Research New England)
  Thesis: Computing with Strategic Agents (2005)
• David Liben-Nowell (now a professor at Carleton College)
  Thesis: An Algorithmic Approach to Social Networks (2005)

Completed Master's students:

• Victor Luo
  Thesis: Max 2SAT-3, Net, Euclidea: Techniques and Results in Computational Inapproximability (2024)
• Jason Liu
  Thesis: Further Hardness Results for Stephen's Sausage Roll (2024)
• Joshua Ani
  Thesis: Unsimulability, Universality, and Undecidability in the Gizmo Framework (2022)
• Dylan Hendrickson
  Thesis: Gadgets and Gizmos: A Formal Model of Simulation in the Gadget Framework for Motion Planning (2021)
• Josh Brunner
  Thesis: Subway Shuffle, 1 × 1 Rush Hour, and Cooperative Chess Puzzles: Computational Complexity of Puzzles (2021)
• Ivan Tadeu Ferreira Antunes Filho (now at Google)
  Thesis: Characterizing Boolean Satisfiability Variants (2019)
• Ray Hua Wu
  Thesis: Complexity of Minesweeper with Restricted Number Sets (2018)
• Kai Xiao (now a PhD student at MIT)
  Thesis: Cookie Clicker (2018)
• Mikhail Rudoy (now at Leapyear Technologies)
  Thesis: Hamiltonian Cycle and Related Problems: Vertex-Breaking, Grid Graphs, and Rubik's Cubes (2017)
• Quanquan Liu (now a postdoc at Northwestern)
  Thesis: Red-Blue and Standard Pebble Games: Complexity and Applications in the Sequential and Parallel Model (2017)
• Jayson Lynch (now a postdoc at University of Waterloo)
  Thesis: On the Computational Complexity of Portal and Push-Pull Block Puzzles (2015)
• Andrea Lincoln (now an Assistant Professor at Boston University)
  Thesis: Analysis of Recursive Cache-Adaptive Algorithms (2014)
• Yanping Chen
  Thesis: Edge-Unfolding Almost-Flat Convex Polyhedral Terrains (2013)
• Kimberly Baldauf
  Thesis: A User Interface for Customizing Cane Layouts in Virtual Glass (2012)
• Tom Morgan (now a PhD student at Harvard)
  Thesis: Map Folding (2012)
• Aviv Ovadya
  Thesis: Origami Transformers: Folding Orthogonal Structures from Universal Hinge Patterns (2010)
• Timothy Abbott (now at Zulip)
  Thesis: Generalizations of Kempe's Universality Theorem (2008)
• Katherine Lai (now at DeepMind)
  Thesis: Complexity of Union-Split-Find Problems (2008)
• Greg Price (now at Zulip)
  Thesis: A Pseudopolynomial Algorithm for Alexandrov's Theorem (2008)
• Ilya Baran (now at Onshape)
  Thesis: Adaptive Algorithms for Problems Involving Black-Box Lipschitz Functions (2004)

Ancestors

Working up the tree of academic ancestors (their advisors, etc.), via The Mathematics Genealogy Project:

Descendants

Working down the tree of academic descendants (my students, their students, etc.) via The Mathematics Genealogy Project:

If you want to make your own trees of mathematical academic ancestors or descendants, check out mathcestor.