Ricky Liu joined the department as a tenure-track assistant professor in 2021. Previously he was an Associate Professor at North Carolina State University, a T. H. Hildebrandt Research Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and an NSF postdoctoral fellow at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. He received his Ph.D. in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under the guidance of Alexander Postnikov in 2010. His research interests lie in algebraic combinatorics, especially its relationship to algebraic geometry, combinatorial geometry, and representation theory.
Cynthia Vinzant joined the department as a tenure-track assistant professor in 2021. She received her PhD from University of California, Berkeley, in 2011 under the direction of Bernd Sturmfels. She spent the following summer as a postdoc at Universität Konstanz, then three years as a postdoc at Michigan. Prior to joining UW, she was an Assistant Professor at North Carolina State University and a von Neumann Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies. Her research area is in real algebraic geometry and its connections with several other fields, especially combinatorics and convex optimization.