Moses Charikar is a professor of Computer Science at Stanford University. He obtained his PhD from Stanford in 2000, spent a year in the research group at Google, and was on the faculty at Princeton from 2001 to 2014. He is broadly interested in the design and analysis of algorithms, with an emphasis on approximation algorithms for hard problems, metric embeddings, and algorithmic techniques for big data. His work on dimension reduction won the best paper award at FOCS 2003. He was awarded the 2012 Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award for his work on locality sensitive hashing, and was named a Simons Investigator in theoretical computer science.