Melody Chan

Melody Chan is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mathematics at Brown University, where she has held this position since joining in 2015. She completed her PhD at UC Berkeley in 2012 under Bernd Sturmfels and was an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer at Harvard University from 2012–2015. Her research focuses on combinatorial algebraic geometry, particularly algebraic curves and their moduli, tropical geometry, and graph theory. She has received significant recognition including the 2020 AWM-Microsoft Research Prize and a 2022 AMS Fellowship.

Her work bridges classical and tropical geometry, with recent contributions to the cohomology of moduli spaces (e.g., A_g and M_{g,n}) using tropical and graph-theoretic methods. She has held prestigious grants like an NSF CAREER award (DMS-1844768) and currently leads projects in algebraic geometry and combinatorics. She advises multiple graduate students and collaborates internationally, organizing events like the 2025 Summer Research Institute in Algebraic Geometry.

Her teaching spans undergraduate and graduate courses, including algebraic geometry, combinatorics, and linear algebra. She co-founded the Horizons seminar at Brown to promote diversity in mathematics and actively contributes to editorial roles (e.g., Combinatorial Theory) and professional societies.