The Simons Foundation has awarded Yuan Zhou, a Ph.D. student in the Computer Science Department, a Simons Graduate Fellowship in Theoretical Computer Science for his project "New Directions in Approximation Algorithms and Hardness of Approximations."

The fellowship seeks to identify emerging stars in theoretical computer science, choosing graduate students with an outstanding track record of research accomplishments. The two-year awards cover tuition, fees, travel and other expenses.

Yuan is co-advised by Venkat Guruswami and Ryan O'Donnell, associate professors of computer science. His research interests focus on approximability of fundamental optimization problems. In his past research projects, Yuan designed approximation algorithms and proved inapproximability results for problems such as solving sparse linear equations, graph cut and graph bisection, unique games, several constraint satisfaction and ordering problems, and densest subgraph.

He also publishes work on other topics of theoretical computer science, including analysis of Boolean functions, algebraic dichotomy theory, algorithmic game theory, and quantum information theory.

Yuan earned his bachelor's degree in computer science at Tsinghua University in 2009, where he attended the Special Pilot CS Class supervised by Turing Award laureate Professor Andrew Yao.