Emmy Murphy

Emmy Murphy is an American mathematician who works in symplectic topology, contact geometry and geometric topology. She graduated from the University of Nevada, Reno in 2007 and completed her doctorate at Stanford University in 2012 under Yakov Eliashberg, with a dissertation on loose Legendrian embeddings in high dimensional contact manifolds. She held a C. L. E. Moore instructorship and an assistant professorship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, moved to Northwestern University in 2016, joined Princeton University as a full professor in 2021 and moved to the University of Toronto in 2023. She is recognised for introducing loose Legendrian submanifolds and for work on overtwisted contact structures in higher dimensions, done jointly with Matthew Strom Borman and Yakov Eliashberg. Her honours include the New Horizons in Mathematics Prize in 2020, an invitation to speak at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2018, a Sloan Research Fellowship in 2015 and the 2025 Krieger-Nelson Prize.