It’s getting towards the end of the academic year, that time when students think about finishing up their studies, and today we had another successful Ph.D. defense of one of those students. This time it was one of mine, Elham Havvaei (pronounced like the state of Hawai’i, glottal stop at the apostrophe and all, but with a v instead of w, and better known by her nickname Haleh).

Haleh is Iranian, but came to UC Irvine via Florida in 2016, after working for a master’s degree with Narsingh Deo at the University of Central Florida. I’ve written here already about the research she’s done with me: reconstructing unknown trees from graphs connecting close-together leaves (from IPEC 2018 and Algorithmica 2020), simplifying graphs whose vertices and edges represent the milestones, tasks, and ordering constraints of a project (SWAT 2020), and classifying problems of finding large subgraphs with one property in graphs with another property (not yet published).

Her next step will be taking a position at Twitter in San Francisco, as a data scientist.

Congratulations, Haleh!

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