Lauren Williams


Lauren Kiyomi Williams is an American mathematician known for her work on cluster algebras and tropical geometry. She is a professor of mathematics at Harvard University.

Education

Williams was the valedictorian of Palos Verdes Peninsula High School in 1996, and graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University in 2000 with a A.B. in mathematics.
She received her PhD in 2005 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under the supervision of Richard P. Stanley. Her dissertation was titled Combinatorial Aspects of Total Positivity.

Work

After postdoctoral positions at the University of California, Berkeley and Harvard, Williams rejoined the Berkeley mathematics department as an assistant professor in 2009, and was promoted to associate professor in 2013 and then full professor in 2016.
Starting in the fall of 2018, she rejoined the Harvard mathematics department as a full professor, making her the second ever tenured female math professor at Harvard. The first, Sophie Morel, left Harvard in 2012.

Awards

In 2012, she became one of the inaugural fellows of the American Mathematical Society. She is the 2016 winner of the Association for Women in Mathematics and Microsoft Research Prize in Algebra and Number Theory.

Selected publications