Nicholas Kocurek

nichok6[at]cs.washington.edu


I am a first-year CSE PhD student at the University of Washington Allen School as part of the CS Theory and Quantum CS Groups, where I am fortunate to work with Chinmay Nirkhe and Shayan Oveis Gharan. Previously, I did my undergraduate at Carnegie Mellon University.
Picture is from the Shofuso Japanese Cultural Center in Philly

Nicholas Kocurek

nichok6[at]cs.washington.edu

I am a first-year CSE PhD student at the University of Washington Allen School as part of the CS Theory and Quantum CS Groups, where I am fortunate to work with Chinmay Nirkhe and Shayan Oveis Gharan. Previously, I did my undergraduate at Carnegie Mellon University.

Research

I am broadly interested in theoretical computer science and particularly in classical and quantum complexity theory. Even more specifically, I like to work with CSPs and their quantum and sampling generalizations. Recently, I have been thinking about what makes low energy states of local Hamiltonians complex and local-to-global theorems for Markov chain mixing.

  • Sampling from the Hardcore Model on Random Regular Bipartite Graphs above the Uniqueness Threshold

    Nicholas Kocurek, Shayan Oveis Gharan, Dante Tjowasi

    Manuscript

    [arXiv]

  • Spectral Certificates and Sum-of-Squares Lower Bounds for Semirandom Hamiltonians

    Nicholas Kocurek

    Manuscript

    [arXiv]

  • Sampling and Identity-Testing Without Approximate Tensorization of Entropy

    William Gay, William He, Nicholas Kocurek, Ryan O'Donnell

    Manuscript

    [arXiv]

  • Spectral Refutations of Semirandom 𝑘-LIN over Larger Fields

    Nicholas Kocurek, Peter Manohar

    APPROX 2025

    [arXiv]

  • Pseudorandomness Properties of Random Reversible Circuits

    William Gay, William He, Nicholas Kocurek, Ryan O'Donnell

    CRYPTO 2025

    [arXiv]

Acknowledgements

My research is supported by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. Summer 2026, I am grateful to be hosted by the Simons Institute as a visiting student for the Summer Cluster on Quantum Computing 2026.

Teaching

I have been a teaching assistant for the following courses:

Miscellaneous

I am a big fan of , Pittsburgh sports, social deduction games, and mystery novels.

I pronounce my last name "koh-sir-ick".

Here is a simple diagram explaining the strange etymology of "kolache" in Texas.