Sungjin Im

Sungjin Im is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he moved in 2025 after more than a decade at UC Merced. He earned his BS and MS in computer science from Seoul National University and his PhD in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, advised by Chandra Chekuri, followed by a postdoctoral position at Duke University. His research centers on the design and analysis of algorithms, particularly learning-augmented algorithms that use machine-learning predictions to beat worst-case bounds, and on scheduling and resource allocation. He also serves as a Consulting Research Scientist at RelationalAI. As a high-school student he won a silver medal representing the Republic of Korea at the 1996 International Mathematical Olympiad.

Notes8

• Moved from UC Merced to UC Santa Cruz in 2025; his Merced homepage now names UCSC as his institution, so his primary affiliation is UCSC.2025
• Won an NSF CAREER award in 2019 for scheduling/resource-allocation algorithm research while at UC Merced, signaling early-career standing in the algorithms community.May 6, 2019
• Has been a Consulting Research Scientist at RelationalAI since February 2019, an industry tie that connects his scheduling/optimization work to enterprise decision-intelligence products.Feb 2019
• Silver medal at IMO 1996 for Republic of Korea (team score 94, 78.1%); the mathematics foundation that led him into theoretical computer science research.
• Current research pivots on learning-augmented / algorithms-with-predictions (e.g. online scheduling via gradient descent, learned BSTs, faster matching via learned duals), a deliberately forward-leaning niche versus classical worst-case scheduling.
• Earned PhD at UIUC under Chandra Chekuri, then a postdoc at Duke with Kamesh Munagala, then joined UC Merced in 2014 -- a theory-community lineage that explains his approximation/online-algorithms focus.
• Google Scholar: 2286 citations, h-index 26, i10-index 59; verified email at ucsc.edu, confirming the UCSC affiliation.
• Publicly states he is not taking a PhD student for Fall 2026, useful for anyone considering reaching out about doctoral openings.2026
• Held research internships at IBM T. J. Watson and Microsoft Research Asia during doctoral studies, a common path into industrial research labs.
• Uses the publication alias 'S. Im' and maintains ORCID 0000-0001-5994-7280.