Michael A. Forbes completed his undergraduate studies in Mathematics at MIT, and obtained his PhD in Computer Science at MIT in 2014, where he was advised by Scott Aaronson and Amir Shpilka. He has subsequently held postdoctoral appointments at the Simons Institute, the Institute for Advanced Study, and Princeton University. His research focuses on the interaction of randomness, algebra, and computation, in particular by constructing explicit pseudorandom objects to derandomize algebraic algorithms.