Dr. Joseph Sawada

Biography

Joseph Sawada received his PhD from the University of Victoria in 2000. He has worked as an NSERC postdoctoral fellow and has been a visiting researcher at institutions including Charles University in the Czech Republic, the University of Sydney in Australia, and the University of Toronto. Since 2003, he has served as a professor in the School of Computer Science at the University of Guelph. Alongside his academic pursuits, he co-founded FreshBooks, a Toronto-based technology company that employs University of Guelph co-op graduates. His research focuses on a variety of combinatorial objects, including necklaces, free plane trees, stamp foldings, vertex orderings, and chordal graphs. Notably, he has worked on efficient listing techniques for non-isomorphic instances of combinatorial objects, a concept explored through Gray codes. His recent research themes include de Bruijn sequences and universal cycles, with ongoing projects involving the efficient construction of these sequences. He has also contributed to the Combinatorial Object Server and launched community projects aimed at generating combinatorial objects. Joseph is an active member of the NSERC Discovery Evaluation Group and has held several organizational roles in academic conferences, including the 24th Ontario Combinatorics Workshop.

Research Interests

Experience