Emmy Murphy


Emmy Murphy is an American mathematician and an associate professor at Northwestern University who works in the area of symplectic topology, contact geometry and geometric topology.

Education

Murphy graduated from the University of Nevada, Reno in 2007, the first in her family to earn a college degree.
She completed her doctorate at Stanford University in 2012; her dissertation, Loose Legendrian Embeddings in High Dimensional Contact Manifolds, was supervised by Yakov Eliashberg.

Career

She was a C. L. E. Moore instructor and assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before moving in 2016 to Northwestern University, where she is an associate professor of mathematics.
Murphy is recognized for her contribution to symplectic and contact geometry. With Matthew Strom Borman and Yakov Eliashberg, she won the Breakthrough Prize for "the introduction of notions of loose Legendrian submanifolds", which are "overtwisted contact structures in higher dimensions".
Murphy was invited to the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2018 and she gave a talk related to some results on h-principle phenomena. Apart from using h-principle to study the flexibility of local geometric models, Murphy's work uses cut-and-paste/surgery techniques from smooth topology. She also works on exploring the interaction of symplectic/contact topology with geometric invariants, such as those coming from pseudo-holomorphic curves or constructible sheaves.
Murphy received the grants from National Science Foundation for the period 2019-2022 on the topic "Flexible Stein Manifolds and Fukaya Categories".

Awards and honors