Kuikui Liu is awarded the 2025 Michael and Sheila Held Prize

Kuikui Liu is among four scholars to receive the National Academy of Sciences’ 2025 Michael and Sheila Held Prize for major advances in the theory of matroids, expanding our understanding of the mixing rates of Markov chains. Through this work, Liu and collaborators Nima Anari, Shayan Oveis Gharan, and Cynthia Vinzant have bridged the theory of high dimensional expanders, the geometry of polynomials, and the analysis of Markov chains. The work resolves the 30-year-old Mihail-Vazirani conjecture that the basis exchange walk on a matroid mixes rapidly, and for initiating the highly influential theory of spectral independence. Creating connections between these three subfields, their work has already led to numerous important developments in theoretical computer science and will continue to drive this work forward in the future. 

Liu is the Elting Morison Career Development Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. He is a Principal Investigator in the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS). His research interests are in the design and analysis of sampling algorithms for high-dimensional probability distributions arising in statistical physics, Bayesian inference, theoretical computer science, and pure mathematics. He earned his PhD in computer science in 2022 from the University of Washington, before joining MIT as a Foundations of Data Science Institute postdoc and an assistant professor. He was the co-recipient of a best paper award at STOC 2019, the William Chan Memorial Dissertation Award in 2022, and the 2023 EATCS Distinguished Dissertation Award.

Presented annually, the Michael and Sheila Held Prize honors outstanding, innovative, creative, and influential research in the areas of combinatorial and discrete optimization, or related parts of computer science, such as the design and analysis of algorithms and complexity theory. This $100,000 prize is intended to recognize recent work (defined as published within the last eight years). The prize was established in 2017 by the bequest of Michael and Sheila Held. The Award will be presented on April 27 during the National Academy of Sciences 162nd Annual Meeting.

Learn more about the prize and see the complete list of recipients.