The Elisha Benjamin Andrews Professor of Mathematics and a Brown faculty member since 1989, Jill Pipher is the founding director of ICERM, one of eight National Science Foundation mathematics institutes in the nation.
Her primary research interests are in areas of mathematics that have broad applications in the physical and life sciences, including harmonic analysis and partial differential equations. Her joint work in the field of cryptography, with Brown faculty members Jeffrey Hoffstein and Joseph Silverman, led to the development of a patented public key encryption system and a startup company called NTRU Cryptosystems, which was acquired by a major security software company in 2009. The NTRU concept is widely used today and is considered one of only a handful of cryptographic systems resistant to attacks from future quantum computers.
From 2011 to 2013, Pipher served as president of the Association for Women in Mathematics. In 2012, she became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society. She is the recipient of an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship and a Presidential Young Investigator Award. In April 2015, she was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the nation’s most prestigious honorary societies.
Pipher taught at the University of Chicago prior to her arrival at Brown and holds bachelor’s and doctoral degrees in mathematics from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Pipher is president-elect of the American Mathematical Society (AMS), an organization of more than 28,000 members worldwide dedicated to furthering mathematics research, scholarship and education. Her two-year term as president begins in January 2019.