Mary Cryan

Mary Cryan is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh, where she has been a faculty member since July 2003. She is affiliated with the Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science (LFCS) and conducts research in theoretical computer science, with a focus on algorithms, counting and sampling, random structures, learning theory, and pseudorandom generators.

Her educational background includes a joint undergraduate degree in Computer Science and Mathematics from University College Dublin (1993), an MSc by research at UCD (1995), and a PhD from the University of Warwick (awarded 2000) under the supervision of Leslie Ann Goldberg. She held postdoctoral positions at BRICS, University of Aarhus (1999–2001), and the University of Leeds (2001–2003) working with Martin Dyer.

• PhD, University of Warwick (2000)
• MSc, University College Dublin (1995)
• BSc (Joint Hons), Computer Science and Mathematics, University College Dublin (1993)

Her research interests lie in the design and analysis of algorithms, particularly randomized algorithms for counting and sampling combinatorial structures. She has made significant contributions to the understanding of Markov chains for sampling matchings, contingency tables, Euler tours, and phylogenetic trees. Her work often bridges theoretical computer science with probability and discrete mathematics.

The trend in her publications shows a sustained focus on fundamental algorithmic problems involving random structures and probabilistic methods. Her work spans exact and approximate counting, mixing times of Markov chains, and learning models in phylogenetics. Recent work includes analyzing log-Sobolev inequalities for log-concave distributions and exact counting on bounded-treewidth graphs.

She has supervised several PhD students, including Veselin Blagoev ("Counting and Sampling Acyclic Orientations", 2018), Páidí Creed ("Counting and Sampling problems on Eulerian graphs", 2010), and James Matthews (co-supervised, "Markov chains for sampling matchings", 2008). She has also been active in academic service, serving as Deputy Director of the Informatics Graduate School since August 2020.

Her research has been published in top-tier venues such as FOCS, STOC, SIAM Journal on Computing, and Journal of the ACM. She regularly lectures courses such as "Informatics 2 - Introduction to Algorithms and Data Structures".