[1] Roughgarden's work deals primarily with game theoretic questions in computer science.

Roughgarden received his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 2002, under the supervision of Éva Tardos.

From 2004 to 2018, Roughgarden was a professor at the Computer Science department at Stanford University working on algorithms and game theory.

[3] He received the Danny Lewin award at STOC 2002 for the best student paper.

He received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers in 2007,[4] the Grace Murray Hopper Award in 2009,[5] and the Gödel Prize in 2012 for his work on routing traffic in large-scale communication networks to optimize performance of a congested network.