My Group
I am fortunate to advise bright, creative, and fun to work with students thanks to the generous support by the ERC starting grants, the ISF grants, and the Azrieli fellows program.
members
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GRADUATEd members
PhD student, graduated 2026.
Gal’s thesis (TBA) focuses on applying tools from free probability theory to the study of spectral expanders, with an eye toward applications in theoretical computer science. His work includes projects on rotating random walks (STOC 2023); analytic approaches to the Zig-Zag product and other graph products (FOCS 2024, ITCS 2025); the initiation of the study of ultra-sparse expanders (RANDOM 2026); and an investigation of super-Ramanujan graphs.
Gal is currently a postdoctoral researcher at MIT. See Gal's homepage.
PhD student, graduated 2025.
Tal’s PhD thesis focuses on local codes and builds on his earlier master’s thesis on the same topic (download), whose results appeared at CCC 2021. This line of research includes a refined approach to constructing LCCs and LDCs (ICALP 2022), constructions of relaxed LCCs (FOCS 2022; CCC 2024), and a lower bound for three-query LCCs (FOCS 2024). Tal has also worked on constructions of tree codes (STOC 2022).
Tal is currently a postdoctoral researcher at UT Austin, hosted by Dana Moshkovitz and David Zuckerman. For more information, see Tal's homepage.
MSC student, graduated 2026.
Yuval worked on constructing weighted PRGs for ROBPs, with a particular focus on improving and simplifying existing constructions. His thesis will be available soon. The resulting paper was published at RANDOM 2026.
Ori Sberlo
PhD student, graduated 2023 (co-advised with Amnon Ta-Shma).
Ori's thesis is titled Error-correcting codes and space-bounded derandomization (download). One paper resulting from this thesis, which appeared at CCC 2022, simplifies the STOC 2018 joint paper with Braverman and Garg. A second paper, published at STOC 2023, improves the seminal Saks–Zhou algorithm for iterated matrix multiplication. The thesis also includes an unrelated coding-theoretic paper that appeared at STOC 2021.
Inbar Ben Yaacov
MSC student, graduated 2022.
Inbar's thesis (download) focuses on the construction of tree codes. One paper resulting from her thesis improves upon the state-of-the-art constructions and appeared at STOC 2022. Another paper, which appeared at RANDOM 2021, gives a conditional constructions of asymptotically good tree codes.
Inbar is currently pursuing her PhD under the supervision of Oded Goldreich and Guy Rothblum at the Weizmann Institute of Science. See Inbar's homepage.
MSC student, graduated 2021.
Oren's thesis (download thesis, slides) focuses on space-bounded derandomization. One part of the thesis revisits the Raz-Reingold "white-box PRG" and provides a more detailed proof. The second part, which resulted in a paper that appeared at CCC 2021, introduced the notion of error reduction from PRGs to WPRGs for ROBPs.
Oren is currently pursuing his PhD at Cornell University. See Oren's homepage.
MSC student, graduated 2020
Shahar's thesis (download) deals with two problems: constructing tree codes and randomness extractors. The tree-code paper introduces the notion of palette-alternating tree codes and appeared at CCC 2020 (see also Shahar's talk). The extractor paper introduces a new notion called a seed-protecting extractor and was published in ToC 2025.
Noam Peri
MSC student, graduated 2020
Opportunities
Prospective students
If you are a bright, creative graduate student, enthusiastic about theoretical computer science that is looking for an advisor - email me. Make sure to attach your CV and grade sheets (undergraduate and graduate). Generally, I only consider students with undergrad average 95+.
Visitors
PhD students with a strong track record from top American / European universities: If you are interested in visiting TAU and working together for a period of one to three months, please email me. CV, LoP, and a reference for a recommendation letter are required.
Postdoctoral fellows
Postdoctoral fellowships are available. Please email me directly for more information.