Venkatesan Guruswami received his B.S. degree in computer science from the Indian Institute of Technology at Madras in 1997 and his Ph.D. in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2001. He is currently a professor in the computer science department at Carnegie Mellon University. Earlier, during 2002-09, he was a faculty member at the University of Washington. Guruswami was a Miller Research Fellow at the UC Berkeley during 2001-02, and was a member in the School of Mathematics, Institute for Advanced Study during 2007-08.
Guruswami's research interests span several topics in theoretical computer science such as the theory of error-correcting codes, approximability of fundamental optimization problems, explicit combinatorial constructions and pseudorandomness, probabilistically checkable proofs, computational complexity theory and algebraic algorithms.
Guruswami currently serves on the editorial boards of the SIAM Journal on Computing and the ACM Transactions on Computation Theory, and as the program committee chair for the 2015 FOCS conference. Previously, he was on editorial board of the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory and was program committee chair for the 2012 Computational Complexity conference. He was an invited speaker at the 2010 International Congress of Mathematicians. Guruswami is a recipient of the Presburger Award (2012), Packard Fellowship (2005), Sloan Fellowship (2005), NSF CAREER award (2004), the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award (2002) and the IEEE Information Theory Society Paper Award (2000).