Gautam Kamath

Gautam Kamath is a computer scientist known for his work in algorithmic robust statistics and differential privacy. He is an assistant professor at the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo, a faculty member at the Vector Institute, and a Canada CIFAR AI Chair. He received the 2026 Gödel Prize and the 2026 Presburger Award. He was a Microsoft Research Fellow at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing before joining the University of Waterloo as an assistant professor in 2019. He is expected to join the Computer Science department at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University in September 2026.

Research Kamath's research concerns algorithms and machine learning under constraints such as data privacy and robustness. The paper gave the first polynomial-time algorithms for high-dimensional estimation in the presence of adversarially corrupted data with error guarantees independent of the dimension, resolving a longstanding problem in robust statistics.

With Clément Canonne and Thomas Steinke, Kamath developed the discrete Gaussian mechanism for differential privacy, presented at NeurIPS 2020, which was deployed in the 2020 United States census.

Awards and honors Gödel Prize, 2026, with Ilias Diakonikolas, Daniel Kane, Jerry Li, Ankur Moitra, and Alistair Stewart, for "Robust Estimators in High-Dimensions without the Computational Intractability" Canada CIFAR AI Chair