Maggie Miller wins the AWM Joan & Joseph Birman Research Prize in Topology and Geometry

The Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM) has selected assistant professor Maggie Miller as the winner of the 2027 Joan & Joseph Birman Research Prize in Topology and Geometry. The award will be presented at the 2027 Joint Mathematics Meetings in Chicago, IL.

Miller is a leader in the low-dimensional topology community and an exceptional researcher whose work combines phenomenal visual intuition, technical depth, originality and remarkable breadth. Her Ph.D. thesis made major progress on a longstanding question of Casson and Gordon concerning homotopy 4-spheres. These results were consequences of her foundational work on the interaction between fibrations on knot and surface complements. Her subsequent work, both solo and with collaborators, resolves several long-outstanding questions on concordance of surfaces in 4-manifolds, knots and their spanning surfaces in dimensions 3 and 4, and knotted surfaces, via a broad set of techniques, and includes many intricate diagrammatic and geometric constructions.

Before joining UT Austin, Miller was a Clay Research Fellow through the Clay Mathematics Institute, a Stanford Science Fellow at Stanford University and an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She received her Ph.D. in Mathematics from Princeton University under the supervision of David Gabai in 2020. Her work has already received major recognition, including the Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prize, a Sloan Research Fellowship, a Packard Fellowship and an invited sectional lecture at the 2026 International Congress of Mathematicians.

Adapted from a press release from the Association for Women in Mathematics