Matthew M. Casey

I am a 2nd year PhD candidate in the Computer Science Theory group, advised by Edith Elkind. My work is in the field of Computational Social Choice, with my main focus thus far being on proportionality in multiwinner elections and participatory budgeting. I am interested in exploring the theoretical properties of voting rules and proportionality axioms: What is the strongest definition of proportionality that is always satisfiable? What is the strongest that can be satisfied in polynomial time? What if you only have partial knowledge of voter preferences?

Additionally, I hope to create a strong connection between theory and practice in my work by implementing social choice methods in practical settings like participatory budgeting and reinforcement learning from human feedback. In the other direction, I aim to use real problems faced by practitioners to motivate new theoretical questions.

Prior to Northwestern, I was a Computer Science and Math major at Northeastern, where I had the privilege of working with Rajmohan Rajaraman on various problems related to scheduling. My research journey started in high school thanks to my advisor Nianjun Zhou and my wonderful teacher Diana Evangelista.