I am a fourth-year PhD student in theoretical computer science at Cornell University. I am advised by Noah Stephens-Davidowitz. My research is in computational complexity theory and cryptography, with a particular emphasis on the complexity class TFNP. I also enjoy thinking about other areas in theoretical computer science, including error-correcting codes and (more recently) differential privacy.

I completed my Bachelor of Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. There, under the guidance of Tevfik Bultan, I used program verification techniques to study the problem of information leakage.

I have been very fortunate to be hosted for summer visits at UC Berkeley with Venkat Guruswami and at Columbia University with Mihalis Yannakakis, where I also worked with Toniann Pitassi. This summer, I am interning at Google Research in Mountain View with Pritish Kamath, Pasin Manurangsi, and Ravi Kumar.

Please feel free to reach out if you want to chat!

Publications

The Structure of In-Place Space-Bounded Computation
James Cook, Surendra Ghentiyala, Ian Mertz, Ted Pyne, Nathan Sheffield
In submission
[Arxiv]

Hierarchies within TFNP: building blocks and collapses
Surendra Ghentiyala, Zeyong Li
In submission
[Arxiv]

Range Avoidance, Arthur-Merlin, and TFNP
Surendra Ghentiyala, Zeyong Li, Noah Stephens-Davidowitz
STOC 2026
[ECCC]

Efficient derandomization of differentially private counting queries
Surendra Ghentiyala
SOSA 2026
[Arxiv]

Downward self-reducibility in the total function polynomial hierarchy
Karthik Gajulapalli, Surendra Ghentiyala, Zeyong Li, Sidhant Saraogi
SODA 2026
[Arxiv]

New constructions of pseudorandom codes
Surendra Ghentiyala, Venkatesan Guruswami
RANDOM 2025
[Arxiv]

The more the merrier! On total coding and lattice problems and the complexity of finding multicollisions
Huck Bennett,Surendra Ghentiyala, Noah Stephens-Davidowitz
In ITCS 2025
[ECCC]

More basis reduction for linear codes: backward reduction, BKZ, slide reduction, and more
Surendra Ghentiyala, Noah Stephens-Davidowitz
In APPROX 2024
[Arxiv]

Obtaining Information Leakage Bounds via Approximate Model Counting
Seemanta Saha(*), Surendra Ghentiyala(*), Shihua Lu, Lucas Bang, Tevfik Bultan
In PLDI 2023
[ACM]
(*) Equal Contribution