Professor Dr. Alexa Sharp

Biography

Alexa Sharp, born in Ottawa, has spent years growing up in Canada and Indonesia. She chose to attend the University of Waterloo, where she was able to mix school with real work through the Co-op program. After six years, she received a Bachelor of Mathematics in Computer Science with a focus on Combinatorics and Optimization. Sharp continued her academic journey by pursuing a Ph.D. in Computer Science at Cornell University, where her thesis focused on incremental algorithms, advised by Dexter Kozen. Following her Ph.D., she moved to Oberlin College in Ohio, where she served as a professor in Computer Science until 2017. Sharp then made a detour into software engineering at Google in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a role she found less enjoyable than teaching, which lasted for three years until she returned to Carleton University. Sharp estimates she has run enough miles to circle the globe at the 28th parallel and has consumed enough candy to nourish a small nation.

Research Interests