The National Science Foundation (NSF) has named Dr Mark Braverman as a 2019 recipient of its Alan T. Waterman Award. This award is NSF's highest honor that annually recognizes an outstanding researcher age 40 years or younger and funds his or her research in any field of science or engineering. This year's awardee will receive a $1 million grant over a five-year period for further advanced study in his field.
Dr Braverman is a computer science professor at Princeton University, and is internationally recognized for numerous contributions for his interdisciplinary research at the boundary of computer science and mathematics. His work has yielded new insights into a wide range of areas including: information complexity, pseudorandomness, algorithmic game theory and economics, continuous computation and dynamical systems, machine learning, and applications of computer science in healthcare and medicine. His work has reinvigorated two of the hottest current research areas in theoretical computer science: information complexity and mechanism design. Dr. Braverman has used information complexity to study the famous direct sum problem for communication complexity, and has settled a longstanding open question by proving a direct sum theorem for randomized communication complexity. Dr. Braverman has also made breakthrough solutions to longstanding problems open for decades, including proving the Linial-Nisan conjecture on pseudorandomness and disproving Krivine's conjecture about the value of the bound in the Grothendieck inequality.
Dr. Braverman is the recipient of several awards, including Best Full Paper Award in Economics and Computation (2018) for the paper "Selling to a no-regret buyer," the European Mathematical Society Prize (2016), the Presburger Award from the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (2016), a SIAM Outstanding Paper Prize for "How to compress interactive communication" (2016), the Stephen Smale Prize from the Society for the Foundations of Computational Mathematics (2014), a Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering (2014), a Turing Fellowship Award of the John Templeton Foundation (2012), an NSF CAREER Award (2012) and a Sloan Research Fellowship (2011).
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
