Ran Raz is a Professor of Theoretical Computer Science at the Weizmann Institute of Science. He received his PhD in Mathematics from The Hebrew University in 1992, and after a postdoc at Princeton University joined the Weizmann Institute in 1994. His main research area is complexity theory, with an emphasis on proving lower bounds for various computational models. More specifically, he is interested in Boolean and arithmetic circuit complexity, communication complexity, probabilistically checkable proofs, quantum computation and communication, and randomness and derandomization.

Prof. Raz has received a number of awards, including the Erdős Prize in 2002, and the best paper award in ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC) in 2004.