Emmy Murphy

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Emmy Murphy is an assistant professor of mathematics at Northwestern University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her work is primarily in symplectic topology, a field connecting abstract mathematical geometry with classical mechanics, optics, and modern physics.

Murphy’s work is focused on understanding symplectic geometry using tools from h-principles and smooth topology. In practice, this means taking complicated mathematical objects and attempting to understand them holistically by studying them from a visual and animated perspective.

Murphy received her PhD in mathematics from Stanford University. In 2015, she received a Sloan Research Fellowship and a prize from l’Académie royale de Belgique for her contribution to the existence of contact structures.