Tim Roughgarden

Tim Roughgarden, an authority in the field of algorithmic game theory (AGT), is a professor in the School of Mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and the Founding Head of Research at a16z crypto. Roughgarden, who started at IAS in 2026, was previously at Columbia University, where he served as a Professor in the Computer Science Department. Prior to Columbia, he was at Stanford following a Ph.D. at Cornell University and a postdoc at the University of California, Berkeley.

His research interests include the many connections between computer science and economics, as well as the design, analysis, applications, and limitations of algorithms. For his research, Roughgarden has been awarded the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award, the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the Kalai Prize in Computer Science and Game Theory, the Social Choice and Welfare Prize, the Mathematical Programming Society's Tucker Prize, the INFORMS Lanchester Prize, and the EATCS-SIGACT Gödel Prize. He was an invited speaker at the 2006 International Congress of Mathematicians and the Shapley Lecturer at the 2008 World Congress of the Game Theory Society. He is a Fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation, the ACM, the Game Theory Society, and the Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory.

He has written or edited ten books and monographs, including Twenty Lectures on Algorithmic Game Theory (2016), Beyond the Worst-Case Analysis of Algorithms (2020), and the Algorithms Illuminated book series (2017-2020).