Lisa Piccirillo Recipient of the Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prize 2021

Lisa Piccirillo, postdoctoral visitor at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics, is one of the first three recipients of the newly inaugurated Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prize Awarded to Women Mathematicians for Early-Career Achievements. She is awarded the prize for resolving the classic problem that the Conway knot is not smoothly slice.

Lisa Piccirillo earned a B.S. in mathematics from Boston College in 2013 and a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin in 2019 with a thesis on low-dimensional topology under the supervision of John Luecke. After a postdoc at Brandeis University, she joined the faculty of MIT as assistant professor in 2020.

The Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prize is awarded to early-career women mathematicians – the number of awards increased from one to three due to the intense interest generated by the Prize and the extremely high quality of nominations. The Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prize was established in 2019 and named for the famed Iranian mathematician, Fields Medalist and Stanford professor who passed away in 2017. During her exceptionally prolific career, Mirzakhani made groundbreaking contributions to the theory of moduli spaces of Riemann surfaces. Each year, the $50,000 New Frontiers Prize award is presented to women mathematicians who have completed their PhDs within the past two years.

The official prize announcement can be found here.