Laura Vargas Koch (born 29 June 1990) is a German former judoka and Olympic medalist [1] and computer scientist and applied mathematician. [2] She holds a professorship in combinatorial optimization as Bonn Junior Fellow in the Research Institute for Discrete Mathematics and Hausdorff Center for Mathematics at the University of Bonn. [3]
Vargas Koch competed at the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro in the women's 70 kg division. She won a bronze medal by defeating María Bernabéu of Spain in the bronze medal match. [4] She retired in 2020 after a knee injury. [5]
She completed a Ph.D. in 2020 at RWTH Aachen University with the dissertation Competitive variants of discrete and continuous flows over time supervised by Britta Peis. [6] Her research concerns algorithmic game theory applied to problems including traffic flow and network routing. She took a professorship at the University of Bonn after postdoctoral research with Rico Zenklusen at ETH Zurich and with José Correa at the Center for Mathematical Modeling of the University of Chile. [7]
