Gulce Kardes

Gülce grew up in İzmir on the Aegean coast, where East meets West––an upbringing that fostered her appreciation for life’s many complexities. She is fascinated by the interplay of structure and randomness in complex systems and draws on tools from statistical physics and theoretical computer science to explore it.

She is now pursuing a PhD in Computer Science at the University of Colorado Boulder under the guidance of Joshua Grochow and Rafael Frongillo. Her theoretical work centers on questions in computational complexity, in particular proving circuit lower bounds through analytical and combinatorial methods on the Boolean hypercube.

At the Santa Fe Institute, Gülce collaborates with David Krakauer and Joshua Grochow to formalize resource trade-offs in models of collective computation, bridging ideas from computational complexity and communication complexity, and with Cris Moore on random constraint-satisfaction problems.

Before beginning her doctoral studies, she earned a BSc in Physics from the University of Leipzig in 2022. In 2019 she served as an Undergraduate Complexity Researcher at SFI and has since carried out research at Norway’s Kavli Institute and Italy’s ICTP.

When she is not doing maths on paper, she loves seeing it in Ikebana, Go, and literature, or some other pleasing combinatorial game which weaves the possibilities implicit in its own material.