Hello there!
I’m Walt McKelvie, an incoming PhD student in computer science at Harvard (where I am lucky to be supported by the NSF GRFP). I did my undergrad in computer science with a concentration in mathematics at Columbia, where you might know me from my involvement in the TCS reading group, the CURC self-driving car project, or the ski team. I’m interested in all things TCS, especially cryptography, privacy, and adjacent computational and statistical problems.
I grew up in Seattle. During high school, I led software development for my high school’s robotics team and interned for two summers at Xevo, an automotive telematics company later acquired by Lear. Before transferring to Columbia, I spent my freshman year at Stevens Institute of Technology, where I worked on systems security research, among other things.
I was fortunate to spend a great summer in 2022 doing work related to digital signal processing at Apple, and another in 2023 at Purdue doing distribution testing research with Paul Valiant. I was part of Columbia’s Crypto Lab, where I was advised by Tal Malkin.