Thomas Rothvoss has been named one of eighteen recipients of a 2016 Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. The Foundation describes the fellows as among "the nation's most innovative early-career scientists and engineers," and provides generous funding so that they have "the freedom to take risks and explore new frontiers in their fields. ... The revolutionary work of these talented researchers has the ability to profoundly impact the lives of their students and all of us in the world at large."
Thomas is a 2015 recipient of a Sloan Research Fellowship and holds a joint faculty position in UW's Department of Computer Science and Engineering. The Packard citation for his award states that his "research is located in the intersection of mathematics and computer science and deals with the question of which types of computational problems can be solved efficiently by algorithms and which ones cannot. In particular, he develops techniques to find approximate solutions to computationally hard problems."