Karen Vogtmann, Goldman Smith Professor of Mathematics Emeritus in the College of Arts and Sciences, has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS).
Vogtmann is among 120 members and 30 international members who were elected in 2022, in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research. With the newest elections, there are now 2,512 active members and 517 international NAS members. Seventy-one Cornellians have now been elected to the academy since inaugural elections in 1863.
A mathematician working in topology and algebra, Vogtmann is known for introducing new topological and geometric models for the study of infinite discrete groups and has had a particularly strong influence on the modern approach to automorphism groups of free groups.
Vogtmann received her bachelor’s (1971) and doctorate degrees (1977) from the University of California, Berkeley. She joined Cornell’s Department of Mathematics in 1984 after appointments at the University of Michigan, Brandeis University and Columbia University.
Vogtmann became the Goldwin Smith Professor of Mathematics at Cornell in 2011 and Emeritus in 2015. She has also had an appointment at the University of Warwick since 2014.
She has received many honors and awards, including the Pólya Prize, the Humboldt Research Prize and several National Science Foundation research grants. Vogtmann has served as Vice President of the American Mathematical Society and as chair of its Board of Trustees. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society and was an inaugural Fellow of the American Mathematical Society.
Other notable Cornell NAS members have included chemist and Nobel laureate Roald Hoffmann (1972), cancer geneticist and Nobel laureate Harold Varmus (1984) and computer scientist Éva Tardos (2013).
