I am a Chair Professor of Computer Science (since 1992) and Director of the Centre for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science (1995--2022).
I have completed higher education at the University of Bucharest, Romania, whereas as an undergraduate student, I started my research activity with Gr. C. Moisil and S. Marcus.
I have supervised 91 graduate students, including well-known academics worldwide, e.g. Professors V. Vianu, UC San Diego, A. Abbott, INRIA, Univ. Grenoble, L. Kari, Waterloo Univ., B. Grenet, Univ. Montpelier, and the famous IT leaders, S. Legg, "Deep Mind" co-founder and M. Talpes, "Bitdefender" co-founder.
My results have been published/discussed in Nature, New Scientist, Pour la Science, Süddeutsche Zeitung (Innovate!), Corriere della Sera, and in interviews with BBC, La Recherche, Österreichischer Rundfunk, and Quanta Magazine.
I had more than 25 visiting appointments, including visiting professorships at Cambridge University, École normale supérieure and
École Polytechnique in Paris, Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (Monbusho visiting professor), Microsoft Research, Sandia National Laboratories, IBM Research and Google, Mountainview.
I was awarded various prizes and distinctions, including an elected member of Academia Europaea (since 2008), co-winner of the Best Paper Award at ACM STOC2017, Montreal (2017), the National Order "Faithful Service" in the degree of Knight conferred by the Romanian President Klaus Iohannis (2019) and co-winner of the Nerode Prize (2021).
I founded with J. Casti and M. J. Dinneen the international conference series "Unconventional Computation and Natural Computation".
In my ever-vanishing spare time, I play tennis and the keyboard.