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AMS Presidents
Bryna Kra

67. Bryna R. Kra

President 2023-2024

Ph.D. Stanford, 1995

Bryna Kra is currently the Sarah Rebecca Roland Professor of Mathematics at Northwestern University, where she was department chair from 2009 to 2012. She was on the faculty of Pennsylvania State University prior to moving to Northwestern in 2004.

Kra is a leading expert on problems at the intersection of dynamics, combinatorics, and number theory. Her work in ergodic theory on multiple ergodic averages settled a long-standing open problem and uncovered the role of nilpotent groups and their homogeneous spaces in the structure theory of measure-preserving systems. An invited speaker at the 2006 International Congress of Mathematicians, Kra received the AMS Centennial Fellowship in 2006 and the AMS Conant Prize in 2010. She is a Fellow of the AMS (2013), a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2016), a Member of the National Academy of Sciences (2019), and she was elected as a Corresponding Foreign Member of the Chilean Academy of Sciences in 2023. 

Kra has served on the AMS Board of Trustees (2016–2021, chair 2019–2020) and over two dozen AMS committees. Kra founded and organized Women in Mathematics groups at both Pennsylvania State and Northwestern. In 2015, she co-founded the Graduate Research Opportunities for Women (GROW) conference, and in 2020 she co-founded the Causeway Postbaccalaureate Program, both aimed at increasing the number of students from historically underrepresented groups attending graduate school in the mathematical sciences.

 

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