NCUWM 2024

Erika Tatiana Camacho, Ph.D.

Dr. Erika Tatiana Camacho has been named the inaugural holder of the Manuel P. Berriozábal, Ph.D. and María Antonietta Berriozábal Endowed Chair as well as a professor in the University of Texas San Antonio College of Sciences’ mathematics and neuroscience, developmental and regenerative biology departments. In 2022 she was awarded a year-long Fulbright Research Scholarship to conduct research at L’Institut de la Vision-Sorbonne Université in Paris, France. She recently held a three-year position as a program director at the National Science Foundation, where she supported several programs advancing racial and gender equity in STEM disciplines, including the ADVANCE program, the Racial Equity in STEM Education program and the Hispanic Serving Institutions Program. Prior to working at the NSF, Camacho spent 16 years at Arizona State University (ASU), most recently as a professor in the School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences. At ASU, she co-directed multiple summer research programs dedicated to the recruitment and training of women, underrepresented minorities and others who might not have had the opportunity to pursue higher education in STEM. Camacho’s current research focuses on mathematically modeling and investigating both the healthy and diseased retinas at the cellular and molecular levels. She published the first set of mechanistic models addressing photoreceptor degeneration, providing a new framework to mitigate blindness. Camacho’s leadership, research, scholarship, and mentoring have won her numerous national and regional recognition, including the 2019 American Association for the Advancement of Science Mentor Award. She graduated with bachelor's degrees in mathematics and economics from Wellesley College. She earned her master’s and Ph.D. in applied mathematics from Cornell University. Camacho attended Garfield High School in East Los Angeles and was a student of Jaime Escalante, the math teacher whose story inspired the 1988 film “Stand and Deliver.”

Emily Riehl, Ph.D.

Dr. Emily Riehl is a professor in the Department of Mathematics at Johns Hopkins University working on higher category theory and homotopy type theory. She is both an organizer and lecturer for the HoTTEST Summer School, a co-host of the n-Category Café, a founding board member of Spectra, and a contributor to the nLab, a category-theory wiki. She serves on the editorial boards for Homology, Homotopy, and Applications, the Journal of Pure and Applied Algebra, and Mathematical Logic Quarterly. In June 2023, Riehl was a visiting professor at the Institute Henri Poincaré-Sorbonne Université in Paris, Francis. She came to Johns Hopkins in 2015 from Harvard University, where she was a Benjamin Peirce Postdoctoral Fellow and NSF Postdoctoral Fellow. Her work involves a variety of topics in category theory related to homotopy theory, frequently in collaboration with Dominic Verity at the Centre of Australian Category Theory in Sydney where was a visiting professor in 2017. She is the author of three books — Categorical Homotopy Theory (2014), Category Theory in Context (2016), and Elements of a ∞-Category Theory, with Verity (2022) — all of which are freely available online. She completed her bachelor's degree in mathematics from Harvard and her Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in 2011, under the direction of J. Peter May. She went to the University of Cambridge in 2007 and earned the Certificate of Advanced Study in Mathematics (Part III) with Distinction. In January 2020, Riehl became the sixth recipient of the $250,000 President's Frontier Award, which supports Johns Hopkins researchers poised to become leaders in their field. Riehl was awarded the 2021 AWM Joan & Joseph Birman Research Prize and named a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society in 2022. Riehl played Australian rugby (known as footy) for the U.S. national team in 2011, 2014, and 2017, at an international tournament for national squads hosted in Australia. She now trains for ultramarathons.