Gülce Kardeş

PhD candidate at the University of Colorado Boulder Graduate Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute

I am a PhD candidate in theoretical computer science at the University of Colorado Boulder, advised by Joshua Grochow and Rafael Frongillo. I am also a Graduate Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute. My research focus is computational complexity theory, where I aim to understand which problems can be solved efficiently across different models of computation, and which structural properties make certain problems fundamentally hard.

I am currently working on circuit complexity lower bounds using algebraic, analytic, and combinatorial methods.

Computational complexity theory teaches us how to design procedures that achieve specific goals under resource constraints. A part of my intellectual life involves bringing this perspective to the study of human problem-solving through studies on puzzles with collaborators at the Santa Fe Institute.

Prior to my PhD, I received a BSc in Physics (2022) from the University of Leipzig and worked on the thermodynamics of computation beyond bit erasure.