Mathematician Vinzant Wins Sloan Fellowship, NSF CAREER Award

Cynthia Vinzant, an assistant professor of mathematics at NC State, was recently honored with a Sloan Research Fellowship in Mathematics and a National Science Foundation CAREER Award.

Vinzant’s research focuses on using tools from algebra to study problems in combinatorics and optimization. She looks at the connections between algebraic objects and the geometry of shapes they define and uses this geometry to better design algorithms for sampling and optimization.

Vinzant is the sixth NC State faculty member to receive the Sloan Fellowship, which has been given annually since 1955 by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Fifty fellows have received a Nobel Prize in their respective fields, and 17 have won the Fields Medal in mathematics.

The NSF CAREER Award is one of the highest awards the foundation bestows upon early-career faculty in the sciences. The five-year award will support Vinzant’s research project entitled “Determinantal, hyperbolic, and log-concave polynomials in theory and applications.” The project aims to use real algebraic and discrete geometry to further develop the understanding of log-concave polynomials that are prevalent within the mathematical sciences.  

Vinzant received her Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2011 and joined the faculty of NC State in 2015.