Bryna Kra
Sarah Rebecca Roland Professor of Mathematics
Bryna Kra earned her doctorate from Stanford University in 1995. After several postdoctoral positions, she was appointed as a faculty member at the Pennsylvania State University in 2000 and joined Northwestern as an Associate Professor in 2004. Kra was appointed as the Sarah Rebecca Roland Professor of Mathematics in 2013. She served as Chair of the Department of Mathematics from 2009 to 2012. She served as President of the American Mathematical Society (AMS) from 2022-2024.
Kra works in ergodic theory and dynamical systems, particularly on problems motivated by 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 analyzing configurations in sets of integers.
Kra received an AMS Centennial Fellowship in 2006, the Levi L. Conant Prize of the AMS in 2010 and was awarded Simons Fellowships in 2016, 2021 and 2025. She was an invited speaker at the 2006 International Congress of Mathematicians. She was named a Fellow of the AMS in 2013, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2016, a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2019, and in 2023, she was named a Fellow of the Association for Women in Mathematics and a Corresponding Foreign Member of La Academia Chilena de Ciencias.
Kra is the founder of Graduate Research Opportunities for Women (GROW), which was awarded the Programs That Make A Difference Award from the AMS in 2020. From Northwestern, she has been awarded the 2022 Provost Award for Exemplary Faculty Service and the 2022 Dorothy Ann and Clarence L. Ver Steeg Distinguished Research Fellowship Award. She currently serves on the Mathematical & Physical Sciences Advisory Board of the Simons Foundation and on the Scientific Advisory Board of the Simons Laufer Mathematical Sciences Institute.