Julia Elisenda (Eli) Grigsby is an American mathematician who works as a professor at Boston College. [1] Her research began with the study of low-dimensional topology, including knot theory and category-theoretic knot invariants. [2] [3] She is currently working in the field of machine learning.
Grigsby earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Harvard University in 1999, [1] [2] after earlier forays into biochemistry and physics. After a year working as an operations researcher in Silicon Valley, she returned to graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley, [3] and completed her doctorate in 2005 under the joint supervision of Robion Kirby and Peter Ozsváth. [1] [2] [4]
She was a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University and the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, and joined the Boston College faculty in 2009. [1]
Grigsby belongs to the advisory board of Girls' Angle, a non-profit organization for encouraging girls to participate in mathematics, [1] [5] and is responsible for creating a sequence of video lectures by women in mathematics for Girls' Angle. [5]
In 2014 she became the inaugural winner of the Joan & Joseph Birman Research Prize in Topology and Geometry, given biennially by the Association for Women in Mathematics to an outstanding early-career female researcher in topology and geometry. [2]