The prize was presented at ICALP 2025 in Aarhus (Denmark) on 9 July 2025. Blikstad conducted this research at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, where he completed his PhD in 2024. He is now a postdoctoral researcher at CWI’s Networks and Optimization group.
Blikstad’s thesis, “Matchings, Maxflows, Matroids: The Power of Augmenting Paths and Computational Models”, revisits classic augmenting-path methods to design faster and simpler algorithms for problems such as maximum flow, matching, and matroid intersection. These problems lie at the heart of combinatorial optimization and have been studied extensively for decades.
Joakim Blikstad’s work addresses a central question: can we develop efficient algorithms that maintain the combinatorial nature of these problems, rather than relying on continuous or algebraic techniques? He explores this question through new approaches that advance our understanding of these problems in modern computational models, such as parallel, dynamic, and online settings.
At CWI’s Networks and Optimization group, Blikstad continues to explore fundamental graph algorithms.
