Peter Manohar

Email: pmanohar [at] ias [dot] edu
Office: 008 Simonyi Hall

About Me

I am a postdoctoral researcher in the Computer Science and Discrete Math group at the Institute for Advanced Study. I am broadly interested in Theoretical Computer Science, specifically in the areas of computational complexity, algorithms, and coding theory. My research is focused on designing spectral algorithms for semirandom and smoothed instances of NP-hard constraint satisfaction problems and exploring connections between these spectral methods and problems in coding theory, extremal combinatorics, and cryptography.

I recently completed my PhD at Carnegie Mellon University, advised by Venkatesan Guruswami and Pravesh K. Kothari. My thesis is available here.

Prior to CMU, I completed a B.S. in EECS at UC Berkeley. At Berkeley, I was advised by Alessandro Chiesa, where I worked on property testing, probabilistically checkable proofs, and coding theory, and Ren Ng, where I worked on computer graphics.

At CMU, my research was supported by an NSF fellowship and a Cylab Presidential Fellowship. For the first three years of my PhD, I was also supported by an ARCS scholarship.

In Summer 2023, I was an intern at TTIC with Siddharth Bhandari, Yury Makarychev, and Madhur Tulsiani.

Once upon a time (in the pre-COVID era), I helped co-organize CMU's Theory Club with Pedro Paredes.
(Photo by Sean Means)

Papers

Other Projects

Teaching