Elizabeth Meckes


Elizabeth Samantha Meckes is an American mathematician specializing in probability theory. Her research includes work on Stein's method for bounding the distance between probability distributions and on random matrices. She is a professor of mathematics, applied mathematics, and statistics at Case Western Reserve University.

Education and career

Meckes went to Case Western Reserve University as an undergraduate, and graduated summa cum laude in 2001 with a bachelor's degree in mathematics and a minor in German. She remained at Case for a master's degree, which she completed in 2002. Her master's thesis, Harmonic Maps Between Graphs, was supervised by E. Jerome Benveniste.
Next, Meckes became a doctoral student of Persi Diaconis at Stanford University. She completed her Ph.D. there in 2006; her dissertation was An Infinitesimal Version of Stein’s Method.
After postdoctoral research at Cornell University and the American Institute of Mathematics, Meckes returned to Case as a faculty member in 2007. She was promoted to full professor in 2018.

Books

With Mark W. Meckes, Elizabeth Meckes wrote the textbook Linear Algebra. She is also the author of Random Matrix Theory of the Classical Compact Groups.

Recognition

In 2019, the Institute of Mathematical Statistics recognized Meckes as an IMS Fellow, "for contributions to Stein’s method and to random matrix theory".