Faculty Spotlight
Alexandra Kolla: Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science, UC Santa Cruz
Research interests
Kolla’s research interests include spectral graph theory, algorithms, complexity, convex programming, statistical physics and quantum computing. Kolla is particularly interested in the use of spectral methods in graph algorithms and more so in developing new spectral techniques that use the full power of graph spectra. She believes such techniques will help shed light into various unanswered complexity questions, like the Unique Games Conjecture.
Education and experience
Kolla was at the University of Colorado Boulder from 2018-2022. She earned her PhD in 2009 from the University of California, Berkeley before going on to serve as a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Advanced Study, Microsoft Research’s Theory Group. She later joined the faculty of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign as an assistant professor, serving for 4 years. During part of that time, she was also a fellow at the Simons Institute for Computing in Berkeley.
Quotable and notable
Kolla enjoys talking with others about her research into spectral graph theory. She said “it is a way to, instead of looking at a graph and working with it, listen to the graph like an instrument: a subtle linear algebra way to understand the graph with mathematics.”
Kolla worked with Assistant Professor Graeme Smith in Physics and JILA to write and define the Quantum Computing and Simulation Pillar of the CUbit Quantum Initiative.
“We established a lot of long-term goals for the initiative in that field,” said Kolla. “We are also talking to people in the practical fields to find challenges that we could theoretically solve with quantum computing. That gives a proof of concept which can also be valuable.”
Alexandra Kolla