Dr Jeff Erickson is an associate professor of computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (USA) since August 1998. His area of expertise is computational geometry. He is married to Kim Whittlesey, a geometric group theorist. Erickson researched the combinatorial game theory (CGT) of what he called "sowing games" and invented four mancala games: Atomic Wari, Partisan Sowing, Reaping and Two-dimensional Sowing.