Lauren K. Williams
Lauren K. Williams is the Sally Starling Seaver Professor at Harvard Radcliffe Institute and the Dwight Parker Robinson Professor of Mathematics in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Her research is in algebraic combinatorics; more specifically, she uses algebraic tools to study discrete structures in mathematics. She is known for her work on the asymmetric simple exclusion process (a model for traffic flow and translation in protein synthesis), soliton solutions to the Kadomtsev-Petviashvili equation, the positive Grassmannian, and the amplituhedron.
Williams completed Part III of the Mathematical Tripos at the University of Cambridge, and obtained her PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under the supervision of Richard Stanley. Subsequently, she was an NSF postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, a Benjamin Peirce Fellow at Harvard, and a faculty member in the Department of Mathematics at UC Berkeley from 2009 to 2018. She is the recipient of a Sloan Research Fellowship, an NSF CAREER award, the AWM-Microsoft Research Prize in Algebra and Number Theory, a Rose Hills Innovator Program award, a Simons Fellowship, a Distinguished Teaching & Service Award from the Mathematics Undergraduate Student Association at Berkeley, and the 2018 Hardy Lectureship from the London Mathematical Society.