About

Hi, I’m David. I’m a PhD student in Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). I am fortunate enough to be advised by Timothy Chan. I completed a BSc in Combined Honours Computer Science and Mathematics and a MSc in Computer Science at the University of British Columbia (UBC) with Will Evans.

You can see a complete list of my papers here. Here is my CV.

I plan on graduating May 2025 and I’m currently looking for academic positions and postdocs.

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Research

My interests lie in theoretical computer science, predominantly in algorithms and data structures. I enjoy thinking about problems involving graphs or geometry.

I enjoyed some early success with geometric optimization challenges (CG:SHOP 2020, CG:SHOP 2021, CG:SHOP 2022). Since then, I’ve worked on geometric data structures, (Hopcroft’s problem, cuttings, simplex semi-algebraic range searching, Voronoi diagrams), and data structures for combinatorial optimization (matchings, submodular optimization). Lately I’ve been thinking about problems in geometric graphs (UDGs, matchings) and planar graphs (MPC, steiner trees, diameter and distance oracles).

Service. I’ve reviewed papers for conferences like SODA 2025, SOSA 2025, ALENEX 2025, ESA 2024, ICALP 2024, STACS 2024, SoCG 2024, APPROX 2023, ESA 2023, ICALP 2023, SODA 2023, ESA 2022, and SoCG 2022, and journals like CGTA and ORL.

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Other Activities

I was involved in competitive programming at UBC. I went to ICPC World Finals 2018 in Beijing and 2019 in Porto, and was the coach of the 2020 and 2021 UBC team (both of which went to world finals in Russia and Dhaka). I am now coaching the UIUC team as of 2022.

I started playing in some Capture the Flag (CTF) events for fun for a bit in 2021-2022. You can see some of my writeups here.

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News

Inspired by others, I’ve started updating my website with news.

[July 2024] Started news section.