Denis Therien

Before joining ServiceNow Research, Dr. Denis Thérien was Vice-President Research and Partnerships at Element AI. He previously occupied a similar position at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR), after serving as Vice Principal of Research and International Relations at McGill University.

Dr. Thérien received his B.Sc. from the Université de Montréal, and his M.Sc., and PhD from the University of Waterloo. He began his career at McGill in 1978, and was appointed Director of the School of Computer Science in 1997. Dr. Thérien was presented the McGill University, School of Computer Science (SOCS), Lifetime Contribution Award on October 22, 2022 in recognition of being a “long-time SOCS Director and all-around guardian angel of the School”.

He is interested in complexity theory and has done extensive work on developing algebraic characterizations for complexity classes. He is also a fan of logical tools, combinatorics, probabilistic methods and mathematics in general.