Emmy Murphy

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Emmy Murphy is an American mathematician and a professor at the University of Toronto, Mississauga. She works in symplectic topology, contact geometry, and geometric topology.

Education and early career
She earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Nevada, Reno in 2007 and a PhD from Stanford University in 2012. Her dissertation, Loose Legendrian Embeddings in High Dimensional Contact Manifolds, was supervised by Yakov Eliashberg.

Career
Murphy has held positions at MIT as a C. L. E. Moore Instructor and assistant professor. In 2016 she moved to Northwestern University as an associate professor. She became a full professor at Princeton University in 2021 and joined the University of Toronto in 2023. She also maintains an office at the Bahen Centre for Information Technology.

Awards and honors
She won the New Horizons in Mathematics Prize in 2020 for work on loose Legendrian submanifolds and overtwisted contact structures in higher dimensions, with Matthew Strom Borman and Yakov Eliashberg. She was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2018.

Research and methods
Her work uses the h-principle to study the flexibility of local geometric models and employs cut-and-paste/surgery techniques from smooth topology. She also explores how symplectic and contact topology interact with invariants from pseudo-holomorphic curves and constructible sheaves.

Funding
Murphy received NSF grants from 2019 to 2022 for the project “Flexible Stein Manifolds and Fukaya Categories.”