He investigates the power and limitations of efficient algorithms for optimization problems. A focus of his work has been semidefinite programming--the systematic combination of linear programming and spectral methods--which for a wide range of problems gives the best known and potentially optimal guarantees in terms of approximation quality. Steurer received his PhD from Princeton University and was a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft Research for two years before joining Cornell University. He is the recipient of the 2010 FOCS best paper award, the 2011 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award Honorable Mention, an NSF CAREER Award, an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, and a Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship.