Benjamin Merlin Bumpus was a faculty research scientist and led the algorithms subproject within the GATAS Lab.
In 2023 he accepted a professorship at the Institute of Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science (IME) at the University of São Paulo (USP) in Brazil, where he now heads the CombTheta research group and the CUÍCA (Categorical Understanding in Computation and Algorithms) lab. His move to USP has expanded his collaborative network across South America and Europe, resulting in joint projects on categorical methods in computational complexity and graph theory. Recent highlights including the Brazilian Category Theory Conference and our paper on temporal data with sheaves being published.
Ben’s research focuses on the emergence of complexity and its relationship to compositionality—the principle that the structure or meaning of a whole depends on that of its parts. He investigates computational complexity, combinatorial explosion, and their connections to graph structure theory, parameterized complexity, and finite model theory, using category theory to relate and generalize tools across these areas.
Ben introduced sheaf theory to the GATAS Lab, initially motivated by characterizing fixed‑parameter tractable algorithms and dynamic programming categorically. This work deepened the group’s understanding of local‑to‑global alignment in compositional computation, extending the earlier focus on how monoidal functors interact with colimits.
Photos
