Mohammad Hajiaghayi

Background

Mohammad Hajiaghayi was born in 1979 in Qazvin, Iran.

Education

Hajiaghayi received his Bachelor of Science with highest distinction in Computer Engineering from Sharif University of Technology in 2000 (in three years), his Master of Science in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo in 2001, and his Doctor of Philosophy in applied mathematics and computer science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2005 advised by Erik Demaine and F. Thomson Leighton.

Career

More specifically he has designed numerous algorithms and taught classes in the areas of approximation algorithms, fixed-parameter algorithms, algorithmic game theory, algorithmic graph theory, online algorithms, and streaming algorithms. He has over 200 publications with over 185 collaborators and 10 issued patents. He went to high school at Shahid Babaee High School (Qazvin Sampad), National Organization for Development of Exceptional Talents (NODET).

He was a post-doc at the Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science and Massachusetts Institute of Technology Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory as well as a researcher at American Telephone & Telegraph Company Labs—Research.

Hajiaghayi was hired as an assistant professor at the University of Maryland in the Fall of 2010. He was promoted to an associate professor with tenure in 2012.

He has served on the program committees of numerous conferences as well as editorial boards of several journals. Hajiaghayi has been the coach of the University of Maryland Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) International Collegiate Programming team in The World Finals.

In 2014, Hajiaghayi along with Seddighin introduced a new CS Theory Ranking based on publications in theory conferences.

Achievements

• Hajiaghayi"s has received National Science Foundation CAREER Award (2010), Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award (2011), University of Maryland Graduate Faculty Mentor of the Year Award (2015), as well as Google Faculty Research Awards (2010 & 2014). So far Hajiaghayi has raised more than 3.4 million dollars in terms of grant award money from government and industry since joining the University of Maryland. With his co-authors Erik Demaine, Fedor Fomin, and Dimitrios Thilikos, he received the 2015 European Association for Theoretical Computer Science Nerode Prize for his work (also the topic of his Doctor of Philosophy thesis) on bidimensionality, a general technique for developing both fixed-parameter tractable exact algorithms and approximation algorithms for a wide class of algorithmic problems on graphs.