Robert Andrews

Photograph of Robert Andrews
Photo by Dan Komoda / Institute for Advanced Study

Email: randrews at uwaterloo dot ca
Office: DC 2306L

I am a William T. Tutte Postdoctoral Fellow in the Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo, where I am hosted by Rafael Oliveira. During the Fall 2025 term, I will be at the Simons Institute to participate in the Complexity and Linear Algebra program.

Previously, I was a postdoctoral member at the Institute for Advanced Study. I received my Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where I was fortunate to be advised by Michael A. Forbes.

I will be on the job market during the 2025–2026 academic year.

Research

I am broadly interested in computational complexity. I particularly enjoy problems that have an algebraic flavor. Here is a short talk, intended for a general mathematical audience, that describes some of my interests.

Teaching

As a graduate student at UIUC, I worked as a teaching assistant for the following courses.

Fall 2022
CS 473: Algorithms
Fall 2021†
CS 374: Introduction to Algorithms & Models of Computation
Fall 2020¶
CS 473: Algorithms
Spring 2019†
CS 374: Introduction to Algorithms & Models of Computation
Fall 2018†
CS 374: Introduction to Algorithms & Models of Computation
Spring 2018
CS 579: Computational Complexity
Fall 2017
CS 475: Formal Models of Computation

†Included on the List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent by Their Students.
¶Received the department’s Outstanding Teaching Assistant award.

Miscellaneous