Thatchaphol Saranurak named Morris Wellman Professor
Assistant Professor Thatchaphol Saranurak has been named a Morris Wellman Faculty Development Professor. This professorship is awarded to junior faculty members in Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) who have demonstrated outstanding performance in teaching and research.
Saranurak’s research explores how to make graph algorithms faster and more efficient. He is particularly interested in ensuring that these algorithms can adapt quickly to changes in data, work well on local sections of large datasets, and can be effectively utilized across distributed computing environments. His work addresses challenging problems in this area, such as creating robust algorithms that can withstand adversarial updates and developing continuous optimization techniques to solve complex combinatorial problems.
Saranurak received the prestigious Presburger Award for 2023 from the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS) in honor of his exceptional contributions to the field of theoretical computer science. Also in 2023, he received an NSF CAREER Award for his project “Theory for Dynamic Graph Algorithms,” which aims to solve open problems in graph theory by studying their interconnections. Under this grant, Saranurak is working on developing general methods for dynamic algorithms that can handle adaptive adversaries, creating faster algorithms that work in less time, simplifying graphs while preserving essential information, and applying continuous optimization techniques to improve dynamic problem-solving.
His innovative approaches have led to significant advances and been widely recognized in the field. For example, his research team received a Best Paper Award at the ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA ’23). Their paper, titled “Dynamic Matching with Better-than-2 Approximation in Polylogarithmic Update Time,” introduced dynamic algorithms capable of quickly updating estimates of the maximum matching size in graphs as edges are added or removed. This work successfully achieved an approximation ratio better than 2, breaking a long-standing barrier in this area.
Saranurak received his PhD in Computer Science from KTH Royal Institute of Technology in 2018, where he was advised by Danupon Nanongkai. Before joining the University of Michigan faculty in 2021, he served as a research assistant professor at the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago.
About the Morris Wellman Faculty Development Professorship
Michael P. Wellman, Lynn A. Conway Collegiate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, endowed the Morris Wellman Faculty Development Professorship in his grandfather’s name. Morris Wellman was an engineer who worked for most of his career as a civil servant of the City of New York.