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.

During her fellowship year at Radcliffe, Williams is continuing her work on interacting particle systems, mirror symmetry, and the amplituhedron. She is also working on a book about cluster algebras.

Williams received her BA in mathematics from Harvard College, and after a year at the University of Cambridge completing Part III of the Mathematical Tripos, she obtained her PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Subsequently, she was a National Science Foundation (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 Berkeley. She was an invited speaker at the 2022 International Congress of Mathematicians and has received the AWM-Microsoft Research Prize in Algebra and Number Theory, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award, a Simons Fellowship, and a Sloan Research Fellowship.