Ben Bumpus is a professor at the University of São Paulo

Benjamin Merlin Bumpus is a professor at the Institute of Mathematics and Statistics (IME) at the University of São Paulo, where he leads the CUÍCA lab — Categorical Understanding in Computation and Algorithms — and is part of the CombΘ research group.

He announced it on Merlin’s Notebook in February 2026, having moved the previous semester: “as of today I am a professor at the Institute for Mathematics and Statistics at the Univesity of São Paulo (USP)!” — the delay, he explains, being that relocating to another continent is distracting, and that he had a first Carnaval to recover from.

Ben was a Research Assistant Professor here from 2022, leading the algorithms subproject. His work on structured decompositions — how to break a problem into pieces in a way that composes — is still how the lab thinks about that question. He arrived in Florida from a postdoc at Eindhoven, and before that a PhD at Glasgow under Kitty Meeks.

He reports that Brasil has “a vibrant (applied) category theory community”, which the same post put to work: it announced the III Encontro Brasileiro em Teoria das Categorias.