We're happy to announce that Ninad Rajgopal has joined the department as a Research Fellow. Ninad is currently funded by Tom Gur's UKRI project "Foundations of classical and quantum verifiable computing".

Ninad completed his PhD at the University of Oxford under the supervision of Rahul Santhanam. He is broadly interested in theoretical computer science, complexity theory, pseudo-randomness, and learning algorithms.

We are pleased to report that members of the department's Theory and Foundations research theme have had 6 papers accepted to the 32nd Annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms. SODA is the top international conference on algorithms research. The papers are:

• "A Structural Theorem for Local Algorithms with Applications to Coding, Testing, and Privacy" by Marcel Dall'Agnol, Tom Gur, Oded Lachish;
• "On a combinatorial generation problem of Knuth" by Arturo Merino, Ondřej Mička, Torsten Mutze;
  
• "Dynamic Set Cover: Improved Amortized and Worst-Case Update Times" by Sayan Bhattacharya, Monika Henzinger, Danupon Nanongkai, Xiaowei Wu;
• "Online Edge Coloring Algorithms via the Nibble Method" by Sayan Bhattacharya, Fabrizio Grandoni, David Wajc;
• "FPT Approximation for FPT Problems" by Daniel Lokshtanov, Pranabendu Misra, M. S. Ramanujan, Saket Saurabh, Meirav Zehavi.
• "Polyhedral value iteration for discounted games and energy games" - Alexander Kozachinskiy

We are delighted to report that Dr Ramanujan Sridharan from the Theory and Foundations (FoCS) research theme at the Computer Science Department has received a prestigious EPSRC New Investigator Award. The approximately £264K project titled "New frontiers in Parameterizing Away From Triviality” aims to develop novel notions of graph edit distance and investigate their connections to efficient solvability of computationally hard problems.

the proposal identifies research questions that are novel, has the potential to have a broader impact both within and outside academia and it is an exciting project that will break new ground.