Poshen Loh

Mathematician born in Alameda County, California.

Birthday: June 18, 1982

Po-Shen Loh is of Singaporean background. He grew up in Wisconsin.

He coaches the USA’s Math Olympiad team.

Education: Loh graduated first in his class from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) with a degree in mathematics, receiving an honorable mention for the Morgan Prize. He completed a master’s degree at Cambridge University on a Churchill Scholarship and earned his Ph.D. in mathematics from Princeton University under Benny Sudakov, focusing on extremal and probabilistic combinatorics.

Academic Career: Loh has been a professor at Carnegie Mellon University since 2010, specializing in discrete mathematics and combinatorics. He teaches courses on these subjects and runs training seminars for the Putnam competition for undergraduates.

Olympiad Coaching: He served as the national coach of the United States International Mathematical Olympiad team from 2014 to 2023. Under his leadership, the team achieved its first victories since 1994, winning in 2015, 2016, 2018, and 2019. Since 2023, Loh has been Vice President of the IMO Foundation.

Entrepreneurship and Outreach: Loh is a social entrepreneur, founding educational platforms such as Expii (a crowdsourced math lesson website) and Live (a livestream-based math education platform). He developed the NOVID contact tracing app during the COVID-19 pandemic. He is recognized for creative problem-solving and incentive-aligned solutions aimed at education and public health.