I am a postdoctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University hosted by R. Ravi. Prior to this, I completed my PhD at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, where I was fortunate to be advised by Chandra Chekuri.

My research is in theoretical computer science. I am broadly interested in algorithm design and combinatorial optimization, with a focus on approximation algorithms, graph theory, and network design.

Contact info:

Email: rheaj at andrew dot cmu dot edu

My Papers

Length-Constrained Network Design in Planar Digraphs [arXiv]

with Chandra Chekuri
to appear in APPROX 2026

A Polylogarithmic Approximation for Buy-at-Bulk Network Design with Protection

with Chandra Chekuri
STOC 2026

Node-Weighted Multicut in Planar Digraphs [arXiv]

with Chandra Chekuri

Streaming Algorithms for Network Design [arXiv]

with Chandra Chekuri, Sepideh Mahabadi, Ali Vakilian
APPROX 2025

A Polylogarithmic Approximation for Directed Steiner Forest in Planar Digraphs [arXiv]

with Chandra Chekuri
SODA 2025

From Directed Steiner Tree to Directed Polymatroid Steiner Tree in Planar Graphs [arXiv]

with Chandra Chekuri, Shubhang Kulkarni, Da Wei Zheng, Weihao Zhu
ESA 2024

Approximation Algorithms for Hop Constrained and Buy-at-Bulk Network Design via Hop Constrained Oblivious Routing [arXiv]

with Chandra Chekuri
ESA 2024

Exponential Time Approximation for Coloring 3-Colorable Graphs [arXiv]

with Venkatesan Guruswami

Approximation Algorithms for Network Design in Non-Uniform Fault Models [arXiv]

with Chandra Chekuri
Mathematical Programming Series A, Oct 2025. Initial version at ICALP 2023, which combined results from two earlier manuscripts:

• Augmentation based Approximation Algorithms for Flexible Network Design
• Approximating Flexible Graph Connectivity via Räcke Tree based Rounding

Improving Greedy Algorithms for the Steiner Forest Problem

advised by Anupam Gupta
Undergraduate Senior Thesis