I’m originally from Evanston, Illinois, where I graduated from Evanston Township High School in 2004. I graduated from Harvard in 2008, where I majored in mathematics and computer science. At Harvard, I was on the board of the Harvard College Democrats and Harvard Hillel and I chaired the Harvard College Progressive Jewish Alliance.

I took part in Harvey Mudd’s fantastic Research Experience for Undergraduates in the summer of 2006, and I recently presented our work on approximation algorithms for traffic grooming (see papers). My undergraduate thesis, which began with a summer at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, was on connections between the Unique Games Conjecture and semidefinite programming-based approximation algorithms (see papers).

I moved with my partner, Jackie, to Lausanne, Switzerland, in August 2008. While she began a master’s at IHEID on a Fulbright Scholarship, I worked as a stagiaire (research assistant) in the Media and Design Laboratory at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) on a project called CityRank (see papers, talks). We chronicle our adventures in Switzerland on our blog SwissWatching.

In the fall of 2009, I started a PhD program in computer science at EPFL. I’m working on algorithms and complexity theory, currently doing a project in the algorithms lab on lattices.

(You may be looking for the other Seth Flaxman, who graduated from Columbia in 2007, worked at the Council on Foreign Relations, and is now at Harvard’s Kennedy School. You can find him on LinkedIn.)