Kathryn Leonard

Kathryn Leonard is an American mathematician and computer scientist. She was President of the Association for Women in Mathematics and is now AWM Past-President.^[1] She is also director of the NSF-funded Center for Undergraduate Research in Mathematics. She is currently on the American Mathematical Society Nominating Committee.^[2]

Kathryn Leonard
Nationality	American
Alma mater	PhD, Brown University, 2004 BS, University of New Mexico
Awards	AWM Service Award Henry L. Alder Award
Scientific career
Institutions	California State University, Channel Islands Occidental College
Doctoral advisor	David Mumford

Leonard's research focuses on geometric modeling with applications to computer vision, computer graphics, and data science. She has received multiple major grants, including a National Science Foundation CAREER Award.^[3]

Leonard and Misha Collins, together with several other collaborators, are authors of "The 2D shape structure dataset", an article on a crowd-sourced database on the structure of shapes.^[4]

Recognition

Leonard received a Henry L. Alder Award from the Mathematical Association of America in 2012.^[5] She received the AWM Service Award from the Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM) in 2015.^[6] The Association for Women in Mathematics named her to their 2025 Class of AWM Fellows.^[7]