2021 Waterman Award

The National Science Foundation (NSF) named Melanie Matchett Wood, Professor of Mathematics at Harvard University, as the 2021 Alan T. Waterman Award recipient: For fundamental contributions at the interface of number theory, algebraic geometry, topology, and probability including establishing deep results in the subject of random matrices, advancing the field by proving, and occasionally disproving, conjectures and widely believed statements.

Some of Dr. Wood’s most cited work, on random matrices, random graphs, and random sandpiles, will have downstream applications in both physics and statistics. One focus of Dr.

Wood’s work has been to develop a nonabelian analogue of the Cohen-Lenstra heuristics, in which class groups are replaced by Galois groups of nonabelian extensions of a varying number field. Dr. Wood also developed a remarkable understanding of quadratic forms with arbitrarily "strange" coefficients.

Dr. Wood is one of the world’s leaders in her field of mathematics and is at the top of her generation in mathematics overall.

Dr. Wood has taken on a leadership role in her profession, promoting greater participation by girls and women in mathematics, for example through her work with high school programs, and communicating the ubiquity of mathematics to a lay audience. At the age of 16, Wood was the first female member of the U.S. international Math Olympiad team and led the first U.S. team to participate in the international Girls’ Math Olympiad contest for high school students.

She has embraced her unique position as a leader in mathematics to inspire others and to be a model for the next generation. Dr. Wood has won numerous prizes and awards, including being the first woman to win the Morgan Prize for the top undergraduate mathematics research in North America and being the first American woman to be named a Putnam Fellow.

She received the AWM-Microsoft Research Prize in Algebra and Number Theory. In addition, she was named a Clay Mathematics Institute Liftoff Fellow, an Inaugural Fellow of the American Mathematical Society, a Sloan Research Fellow, and a recipient of a Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering.

Dr. Wood received her BS degree from Duke University in 2003 and her PhD from Princeton University in 2009. She was an AIM Fellow from 2009-2014 and named as a Clay Liftoff Fellow in 2009, holding these at Stanford University, and in 2011 joined the faculty of the University of Wisconsin as an Assistant Professor. She moved to the University of California at Berkeley as a Professor in 2019 and since May of 2020 has been a Professor at Harvard University.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.