Jill Pipher is vice president for research at Brown University and Elisha Benjamin Andrews Professor of Mathematics. She was the founding director of the Institute for Computational and Experimental Research in Mathematics (ICERM), a National Science Foundation mathematics institute, from 2010 to 2016. Pipher obtained her B.A. in mathematics from UCLA in 1979 and her Ph.D. in mathematics from UCLA in 1985.
She was a Dickson Instructor and assistant professor at the University of Chicago before joining the faculty of Brown as associate professor in 1989. Pipher’s research areas include harmonic analysis, partial differential equations, and lattice-based cryptography. She has frequently lectured for both specialist and general audiences at venues in the U.S. and abroad. In 2014, she was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians.
She has published many papers in her areas of expertise and has co-authored an undergraduate cryptography textbook. She was a co-founder of NTRU Cryptosystems, Inc., acquired in 2009, and jointly holds four patents related to the NTRU encryption and digital signature algorithm. Pipher’s professional honors include an NSF postdoctoral fellowship, an NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award, and an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation fellowship. She is an inaugural fellow of the American Mathematical Society, served as president of the Association for Women in Mathematics from 2011 to 2013, and was a National Women’s History Month 2013 honoree.
In 2015, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 2019 she was elected as Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. She served as President of the American Mathematical Society from 2019-2021, and was elected in 2022 as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.