Hajiaghayi Named 2022 AAAS Fellow

Mohammad Hajiaghayi, who holds the Jack and Rita G. Minker Professor of Computer Science with a joint appointment in the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, was just named a 2022 Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

He is one of four faculty in the College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences (CMNS) honored this year, joining Abba Gumel, Wolfgang Losert and Dana Nau.

“I join the CMNS community in congratulating Professors Gumel, Hajiaghayi, Losert and Nau on their well-deserved election as AAAS Fellows,” said CMNS Dean Amitabh Varshney. “This is an affirmation of what we already know—that they are each pushing the boundaries in their respective fields and making a significant impact on the grand challenges our society faces today.”

The four CMNS faculty are part of a class of 506 new Fellows who have moved their fields forward, paving the way for scientific advances that benefit society. They bring diverse and novelty thinking, innovative approaches and passion that will help solve the world’s most complex problems, according to AAAS’s announcement.

“AAAS is proud to elevate these standout individuals and recognize the many ways in which they’ve advanced scientific excellence, tackled complex societal challenges and pushed boundaries that will reap benefits for years to come,” Sudip S. Parikh, AAAS chief executive officer and executive publisher of the Science family of journals, said in an announcement.

Hajiaghayi was specifically noted for his significant contributions to the fields of algorithmic graph theory and algorithmic game theory.

His research and scholarship involve algorithmic game theory and combinatorial auctions, network design, combinatorial optimizations and approximation algorithms, fixed-parameter algorithms, algorithmic graph theory, distributed and mobile computing, machine learning, and computational geometry and embeddings. He has 350 refereed technical publications.

Hajiaghayi is a Guggenheim Fellow, an IEEE Fellow, an Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Fellow, a European Association for Theoretical Computer Science Fellow and a Blavatnik Honoree. He received a University of Waterloo Alumni Achievement Medal, an Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award, as well as a National Science Foundation CAREER Award. He was also an Amazon Scholar, a visiting research scientist at Google AI-Research and a visiting researcher at Microsoft Research.

He is editor-in-chief of Algorithmica, the oldest and leading journal dedicated to algorithms, and his comprehensive book “Computational Intractability: A Guide to Algorithmic Lower Bounds’’ (MIT Press), co-authored with MIT Professor Erik Demaine and UMD Computer Science Professor William Gasarch, is now available.

Before joining UMD, Hajiaghayi was a senior researcher in the Algorithms and Theoretical Computer Science group at AT&T Labs. Prior to that, he was a one-year postdoctoral fellow in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University and a one-year postdoctoral associate at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He received his doctorate in applied mathematics at MIT in 2005, his M.S. in computer science from the University of Waterloo in 2001 and his undergraduate degree in computer engineering from Sharif University of Technology in 2000.