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Harvard Math professor Lauren K. Williams ’00 was named a recipient of the 2025 MacArthur Fellowship, the foundation announced on Wednesday.
The MacArthur “Genius Grant,” which comes with an unrestricted $800,000 grant over five years, was awarded to Williams, 47, for her interdisciplinary research in theoretical mathematics and physics. The award is considered one of the most prestigious academic awards in the country.
Scholars are nominated anonymously by their peers, and never learn of their consideration until the final selection committee approves the grant. Williams said she was in “shock” when she received a call from the MacArthur Foundation informing her of the award.
“I think they got worried that either I wasn’t there anymore or maybe I’d already been tipped off,” Williams said. “It was really just shock, and I was trying to figure out if I was really awake.”
Amid the Trump administration’s ongoing effort to restrict federal funding to Harvard, Williams was one of hundreds of researchers who lost all National Science Foundation grant money after a $2.2 billion freeze in April. Though a judge ordered the White House to restore the funding last month, most Harvard awardees including Williams are still waiting for the money to return.
“This fellowship is really kind of a lifeline at this moment,” she said. “The fellowship is giving me that peace of mind that I can keep doing what I was doing.”
Williams studies algebraic combinatorics — a field that uses algebra to study discrete structures, or things that can be counted. She is well known for research on properties of the positive Grassmannian, a positive geometric space encapsulating all planes of a fixed dimension.
Williams said she was first encouraged by teachers to explore math in elementary school after winning a local contest. She concentrated in Math as a Harvard undergraduate before earning her doctorate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
After teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, she returned to Harvard in 2018 — becoming only the second woman to earn tenure in the Math Department’s history.
“If you love it, then just go for it,” Williams said. “I knew that if somehow academia didn’t work out, there were some comfortable fallback options in industry.”
In an announcement of the winners, the Foundation wrote that Williams is a mathematician “elucidating unexpected connections” through her work in algebraic combinatorics and physics.
“With a curiosity-driven approach to research and willingness to collaborate across disciplines, Williams is expanding fundamental mathematical theory and building fruitful connections between mathematics and other scientific fields,” they wrote.
With the MacArthur funds, Williams plans to continue work on the amplituhedron and projects involving Macdonald polynomials and cluster algebras.
Though her work is often theoretical, she said it can be taught to students at a fundamental level.
“Everybody loves playing with some kind of toy,” she said. “You may not be able to really explain the intricacies or the subtleties of what I’ve struggled with in my research, but there’s always some place that you can start that’s accessible.”
