Kira Goldner

Shibulal Family Career Development Professor
Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences
Boston University

About me


I am a Shibulal Family Career Development Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences at Boston University, am affiliated with Computer Science, and am a member of the Algorithms & Theory group.

My research interests are primarily in algorithmic mechanism design and approximation algorithms, particularly in using these techniques to improve access to rights and opportunities or mitigate global harms. As part of this agenda, I originally co-founded the Mechanism Design for Social Good initiative. I am also interested in the intersection of these topics with healthcare, climate change, law, AI Ethics, and more, as well as more foundational topics such as revenue maximization, and varied behavioral and informational assumptions. See my publications on my research page or information for prospective PhD students.

Before joining Boston University, I was an NSF Mathematical Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellow and a Data Science Institute Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia University hosted by Tim Roughgarden.

I received my PhD in Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, where I was very fortunate to be advised by Anna Karlin. During my PhD, I was very generously supported by a 2017-19 Microsoft Research PhD Fellowship and a 2016-17 Google Anita Borg Scholarship.

Before that, I attended Oberlin College where I received a B.A. in Mathematics and minored in Computer Science. I also studied at Budapest Semesters in Mathematics. My Curriculum Vitae can be found here.

My cats Scarf and Xenna have their own instagram with far more interesting content than the rest of this webpage.


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