Gulce Kardes
Graduate Fellow
Gülce was born and raised in Izmir, a town on the Aegean shore with cultural connections to both the East and the West, which allowed her to reflect on many complexities of life from an early age. She is passionate about understanding the role of "structure" in "complexity" and identifying the properties of a system that contribute to its complexity, using methods from physics and theoretical computer science to do so.
Gülce is currently a PhD student in computer science at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where she is advised by Joshua Grochow and Rafael Frongillo. Her research in computer science theory focuses on exploring structure and complexity through the lens of computational complexity theory. Currently, she is studying circuit lower bounds using analytical and combinatorial techniques on the Boolean hypercube.
At SFI, Gülce is collaborating with David Krakauer, David Wolpert and Joshua Grochow, on formalising resource tradeoffs in collective computation models via mathematical considerations rooted in computational complexity and communication complexity.
Prior to her PhD studies, Gülce received her BSc degree in physics from University of Leipzig in 2022, with concentration on stochastic thermodynamics. She also had the privilege to be a UCR of SFI in 2019, and then work at the Kavli Institute in Norway and ICTP in Italy.
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.