Cynthia Vinzant

Cynthia Vinzant is an American mathematician specializing in real algebraic geometry; her research has also involved algebraic combinatorics, matroid theory, Hermitian matrices, and spectrahedra in convex optimization. She is an associate professor of mathematics at the University of Washington.^[1]

Vinzant at the Oberwolfach Research Institute for Mathematics in 2017

Education and career

Vinzant is a 2007 graduate of Oberlin College in Ohio, where she studied mathematics and neuroscience.^[2] She completed her Ph.D. in mathematics in 2011 at the University of California, Berkeley, with the dissertation Real Algebraic Geometry in Convex Optimization supervised by Bernd Sturmfels.^[2][3]

After working as a Hildebrandt Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan and as a postdoctoral researcher at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing in Berkeley, Vinzant obtained a tenure-track assistant professor position at North Carolina State University in 2015. She moved to the University of Washington in 2021 and was promoted to associate professor in 2023.^[2]

Recognition

In 2020, Vinzant was named as a Sloan Research Fellow in mathematics^[4] and as a von Neumann Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study.^[2][5] She was elected as a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society in the 2024 class of fellows.^[6] Vinzant and colleagues will receive^[7] the 2025 Michael and Sheila Held Prize^[8] from the National Academy of Sciences.