Welcome Courant's Newest Faculty Members (AY 2025-26)
September 2, 2025
We are thrilled to welcome nine new faculty members this academic year—with six joining Courant for the fall semester. From game theory and robotics to biological mechanisms and quantum computing, the group boasts a wide variety of backgrounds and interests. Read through their short bios below.
Fall 2025
Alex Cohen, Assistant Professor of Mathematics, is a Clay Research Fellow whose research focuses on harmonic analysis, combinatorics, and microlocal analysis. He received a dual BS/MS degree in mathematics from Yale University before completing his PhD at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was a Barry Goldwater Scholar and received a Hertz Foundation Fellowship.
Greg Durrett, Associate Professor of Computer Science and Data Science, conducts research in large language models (LLMs), natural language processing, and machine learning. His current work aims to understand and improve textual reasoning in LLMs. He received his PhD in Computer Science at the University of California Berkeley and joins us from the faculty of The University of Texas at Austin, where he served as an Associate Professor of Computer Science. He has received an NSF CAREER Award and a Sloan Research Fellowship.
Romain Lopez, Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Biology, develops probabilistic machine learning methods to uncover the biological mechanisms that govern cellular behavior and disease. He received his MSc in Applied Mathematics from École polytechnique and his PhD in Computer Science from the University of California Berkeley. From 2021 to 2025, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Genentech and Stanford Medicine. Professor Lopez leads the Biological Machine Learning group in collaboration with NYU’s Department of Biology.
Ben Riviere, Assistant Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and Computer Science, conducts research at the intersection of planning, learning, and dynamical systems with applications in robotics, space autonomy, and self-driving cars. He received his MS and PhD in Aeronautics from the California Institute of Technology. He is jointly appointed with the NYU Tandon School of Engineering.
Florian Schäfer, Assistant Professor of Computer Science, received his MS in Mathematics at the University of Bonn before completing his PhD in Applied and Computational Mathematics at the California Institute of Technology. His research interests lie at the interface of numerical computation, statistical inference, and competitive games. He joins Courant from the faculty of Georgia Tech’s School of Computing.
Sherry Yang, Assistant Professor of Computer Science, received her Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley and her B.S. and M.Eng. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr. Yang’s research aims to develop machine learning models with internet-scale knowledge to make better-than-human decisions. She most recently worked as a Research Scientist at Google DeepMind.
Spring 2026
Sanjeev Khanna, Professor of Computer Science, focuses on approximation algorithms, computational intractability, and sublinear algorithms. He is an ACM Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Sloan Fellow. He received his PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University, and he joins us from the University of Pennsylvania where he was the Henry Salvatori Professor of Computer and Information Science.
Ofer Kimchi, Assistant Professor of Mathematics, works to develop mathematical models that can help us better understand biological phenomena, particularly focusing on RNA interactions. He received his PhD in Biophysics from Harvard University. He is a Branco Weiss fellow. Before joining Courant, Ofer was a Lewis-Sigler Theory Scholar at Princeton University.
Fermi Ma, Assistant Professor of Computer Science, focuses his research on quantum computing and its implications for cryptography, complexity theory, and physics. He received a B.S. in Mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before completing both his Masters and Ph.D. in Computer Science at Princeton University. Most recently, he was a Simons-Berkeley Postdoctoral Fellow at the Simons Institute and UC Berkeley.