Melanie Matchett Wood

Melanie Matchett Wood is a Radcliffe Alumnae Professor at Harvard Radcliffe Institute and a professor of mathematics at Harvard University. She studies questions about how number systems can be expanded into larger systems and how such expansions affect primes and factorization in the number systems.

During her Radcliffe fellowship, Wood is developing new tools in the probability theory of random algebraic structures, motivated by the classical probability theory of random numbers. Her goal is to apply a probabilistic viewpoint to better understand the distribution of different structures that arise across mathematics.

Wood has been awarded the AWM-Microsoft Research Prize in Algebra and Number Theory and a Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering, and she is a fellow of the American Mathematical Society. In 2021, Wood received the National Science Foundation's Alan T. Waterman Award, the nation's highest honor for early-career scientists and engineers. In 2022, Wood received a MacArthur Fellowship.