Sherry Sarkar

I’m a sixth and final year mathematics PhD student in the Algorithms, Combinatorics, Optimization program at Carnegie Mellon University. I’m fortunate enough to be advised by Dr. Anupam Gupta.

I’ve also had the pleasure of doing a lot of research outside of CMU – last summer, I worked with the Algorithms Group at Microsoft Research, and in the fall of 2022, I was part of the Simons Theory of Computering “Data Driven Decision Properties” program.

I graduated with my Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science at Georgia Institute of Technology in 2020. I am interested in all things discrete optimization. Some of my favorite problems include online bipartite matching (and its generalization to matroid intersection), and network design. I like to study problems in both a full information (offline) and parital information setting (online), and my current research direction is to understand what flexibility applications might lend to online problems to give us offline performance guarantees.

I also really enjoy mentoring and teaching. I’ve teaching at the undergraduate level for over eight years; I’ve also taught in high school math circles as well as done outreach and tutoring volunteer work for elemetary students. For mentoring, I’ve been particularly involved in the Polymath Jr Research Program; in 2023, I led my own research group producing surveys in theory CS.

Outside of work, I am an avid foodie, I foster cats, and I rock climb!