Radu Horia Mihăescu

Radu Horia Mihaescu is a Romanian mathematician who represented Romania at the International Mathematical Olympiad in 1997, 1998 and 1999, winning a bronze, a gold (rank 18) and a silver medal respectively. He went on to earn a PhD in Mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley in 2008 under Lior Pachter and Satish Rao, with a dissertation on distance methods for phylogeny reconstruction. His research sits at the intersection of combinatorics and computational biology, including work on neighbor-joining and least-squares tree inference published in PNAS and Algorithmica.

Notes3

• Represented Romania at the IMO three consecutive years, medalizing every time: Bronze 1997 (rank 131), Gold 1998 (rank 18, 34 pts), Silver 1999 (rank 45) - a rising trajectory that peaked with gold in 1998.Jul 1, 1999
• Earned a PhD in Mathematics at UC Berkeley in 2008 with dissertation 'Distance Methods for Phylogeny Reconstruction' (combinatorics), advised by Lior Pachter and Satish Rao - moving from olympiad combinatorics into computational biology.Jan 1, 2008
• Co-authored foundational phylogenetics papers including 'Combinatorics of least-squares trees' (PNAS 2008) and 'Why Neighbor-Joining Works' (Algorithmica 2007), placing him among the theoreticians of distance-based tree reconstruction.Jun 1, 2008