Laura Vargas Koch

Laura Vargas Koch (born 29 June 1990) is a German former judoka and Olympic medalist and computer scientist and applied mathematician. She is University Professor at RWTH Aachen University where she heads the chair of algorithmic game theory and discrete mathematics.

Judo competition Vargas Koch competed at the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro in the women's 70 kg division. She won a bronze medal by defeating María Bernabéu of Spain in the bronze medal match. She retired in 2020 after a knee injury.

Academic career She completed a Ph.D. in 2020 at RWTH Aachen University with the dissertation Competitive variants of discrete and continuous flows over time supervised by Britta Peis. Her research concerns algorithmic game theory applied to problems including traffic flow and network routing. She took a professorship at the University of Bonn after postdoctoral research with Rico Zenklusen at ETH Zurich and with José Correa at the Center for Mathematical Modeling of the University of Chile, before returning to RWTH Aachen as a professor.