Emmy Murphy

Murphy graduated from the University of Nevada, Reno in 2007,[1] She completed her doctorate at Stanford University in 2012; her dissertation, Loose Legendrian Embeddings in High Dimensional Contact Manifolds, was supervised by Yakov Eliashberg.[1][2]

She was a C. L. E. Moore instructor and assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology[1] before moving in 2016 to Northwestern University, where she became an associate professor of mathematics. She moved to Princeton University in 2021 as a full professor.[3]

Murphy is recognized for her contribution to symplectic and contact geometry. She won the New Horizons in Mathematics Prize in 2020[4] for "the introduction of notions of loose Legendrian submanifolds"[5], and "overtwisted contact structures in higher dimensions", which is joint work with Matthew Strom Borman and Yakov Eliashberg[5].

Murphy was invited to the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2018 and she gave a talk related to some results on h-principle phenomena.[6] Apart from using h-principle to study the flexibility of local geometric models, Murphy's work uses cut-and-paste/surgery techniques from smooth topology. She also works on exploring the interaction of symplectic/contact topology with geometric invariants, such as those coming from pseudo-holomorphic curves or constructible sheaves[1].

Murphy received the grants from National Science Foundation for the period 2019–2022 on the topic "Flexible Stein Manifolds and Fukaya Categories". [7]

• Von Neumann Fellow, Institute for Advanced Study, 2019–2020.[1][8]
• New Horizons in Mathematics prize awarded by the Breakthrough Prize Foundation 2020.[9][5]
• Invited speaker at the 2018 International Congress of Mathematicians.[10][6]
• Joan & Joseph Birman Research Prize 2017 by the Association for Women in Mathematics.[11][12]
• AWM Birman Prize 2016 by Royal Academy of Science, Letters and Fine Arts of Belgium.[1][11]
• Sloan Research Fellowship 2015.

• Loose Legendrian Embeddings in High Dimensional Contact Manifolds
• Klarreich, Erica (March 27, 2023). "Emmy Murphy Is a Mathematician Who Finds Beauty in Flexibility". Quanta Magazine.