PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Gautam Kamath

Gautam Kamath is a computer scientist who works on privacy and robustness in statistics and machine learning. He completed a doctorate at MIT in 2018 and joined the University of Waterloo as an assistant professor in 2019. The discrete Gaussian mechanism that he co-developed for differential privacy was deployed in the 2020 US census, and he shared an ICML 2024 best paper award for a position paper on differentially private learning. In 2026 he received the Presburger Award and shared the Gödel Prize with five co-authors for work on robust estimators in high dimensions. As of October 2026, he is an assistant professor at NYU's Courant Institute, on leave from Waterloo.

Timeline

  1. 2012–2018

    A doctorate at MIT

    In 2012 he graduates from Cornell with a degree in computer science and electrical and computer engineering. At MIT, a master's degree follows in 2014 and a PhD in 2018, with Costis Daskalakis as advisor.

  2. 2018–2019

    Assistant professor at Waterloo

    As a Microsoft Research Fellow, he works at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing in the fall 2018 and spring 2019 semester programs. The University of Waterloo hires him as an assistant professor in 2019.

  3. 2020

    The discrete Gaussian mechanism

    With Clément Canonne and Thomas Steinke, he develops the discrete Gaussian mechanism for differential privacy, presented at NeurIPS 2020. The 2020 US Census deploys it as the key primitive underlying its Disclosure Avoidance System.

  4. 2023

    A Canada CIFAR AI Chair

    In 2023 he is named a Canada CIFAR AI Chair for his contributions to differential privacy, machine learning and statistics.

  5. 2024

    A best paper at ICML

    Florian Tramèr and Nicholas Carlini share the ICML 2024 best paper award with him. The award goes to their position paper on differentially private learning with large-scale public pretraining.

  6. 2026

    The Presburger Award

    The European Association for Theoretical Computer Science gives him the 2026 Presburger Award, which goes to a young scientist for contributions to theoretical computer science.

  7. 2026

    A Gödel Prize for robust statistics

    Five co-authors share the 2026 Gödel Prize with him for their paper on robust estimators in high dimensions. The paper's first presentation comes at the 2016 Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science.

  8. Since 2026

    Assistant professor at NYU Courant

    He joins the computer science faculty at NYU's Courant Institute as an assistant professor in 2026, on leave from the University of Waterloo.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Gautam Kamath yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Gautam Kamath's Homepage gautamkamath.com. Checked 15 October 2026.
  2. Gautam Kamath - Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org. Checked 15 October 2026.
  3. Gautam Kamath and colleagues win 2024 Caspar Bowden PET Award | Cheriton School of Computer Science | University of Waterloo uwaterloo.ca. Checked 15 October 2026.
  4. Gautam Kamath and international colleagues win best paper award at ICML 2024 | Cheriton School of Computer Science | University of Waterloo cs.uwaterloo.ca. Checked 15 October 2026.
  5. ICML 2024 Awards icml.cc. Checked 15 October 2026.
  6. Gautam Kamath Receives 2026 Presburger Award cims.nyu.edu. Checked 15 October 2026.
  7. Gautam Kamath and collaborators awarded 2026 Gödel Prize | Cheriton School of Computer Science | University of Waterloo cs.uwaterloo.ca. Checked 15 October 2026.
  8. Gautam Kamath Awarded 2026 Gödel Prize cims.nyu.edu. Checked 15 October 2026.