I am an Assistant Professor at MIT's Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department and a member of CSAIL.
Prior to joining MIT's faculty I was a postdoctoral researcher in Jennifer Chayes's group at Microsoft Research, New England. And before that I spent four wonderful years at UC Berkeley's theory of computation group advised by Christos Papadimitriou. I did my undergraduate studies in Greece at the National Technical University of Athens.
My research focus is on algorithmic game theory, computational biology and applied probability.
My Ph.D. thesis was awarded the 2008 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award. The press release is here.
Together with Paul Goldberg and Christos Papadimitriou, we received the 2008 Game Theory and Computer Science Prize for our paper "The Complexity of Computing a Nash Equilibrium." The prize is awarded once every four years at the World Congress of the Game Theory Society. The citation reads in part as follows: "This paper made key conceptual and technical contributions in an illustrious line of work on the complexity of computing Nash equilibrium. It also highlights the necessity of constructing practical algorithms that compute equilibria efficiently on important subclasses of games." Here is a report from the congress by Paul.
Here is a simplified exposition of our article that we wrote for CACM's February 2009 Issue.
I also wrote a survey article on the complexity of Nash equilibria, which appeared in a Computer Science Review special volume dedicated to Christos Papadimitriou's work.
I'm a recipient of the 2007 Microsoft Research Fellowship in Honor of Dean A. Richard Newton, a UC Regents Fellowship, and a Best Student Paper award at the 2006 ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce.
Committees: SODA 2008, EC 2009, SAGT 2009, STOC 2010.
Link to academic work.
The Satrapy
What a misfortune, although you are madefor fine and great works
this unjust fate of yours always
denies you encouragement and success;
that base customs should block you;
and pettiness and indifference.
And how terrible the day when you yield
(the day when you give up and yield),
and you leave on foot for Susa,
and you go to the monarch Artaxerxes
who favorably places you in his court,
and offers you satrapies and the like.
And you accept them with despair
these things that you do not want.
Your soul seeks other things, weeps for other things;
the praise of the public and the Sophists,
the hard-won and inestimable Well Done;
the Agora, the Theater, and the Laurels.
How can Artaxerxes give you these,
where will you find these in a satrapy;
and what life can you live without these.
Constantine P. Cavafy (1910)