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Irena Swanson is Professor of Mathematics and Head of the Department of Mathematics at Purdue University. Her research is in commutative algebra, particularly integral closure, primary decomposition, asymptotic properties of ideals, and computational methods. She earned her Ph.D. from Purdue University in 1992 under the supervision of Craig Huneke. After a three-year postdoctoral appointment at the University of Michigan, she held positions as assistant professor and associate professor at New Mexico State University. She subsequently served as Professor of Mathematics at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, for fifteen years before returning to Purdue University in 2020 as professor and department head. Together with Craig Huneke, she coauthored the graduate text Integral Closure of Ideals, Rings, and Modules. She is also the author of Introduction to Analysis with Complex Numbers. Swanson was elected a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society in the 2019 class and was a Fulbright-NAWI Visiting Professor in Graz, Austria, in Fall 2018. Since 2002, she has served as a moderator and co-moderator of the commutative algebra section of the Mathematics arXiv.

Professor Swanson’s research focuses on commutative algebra and its interactions with computational algebra and combinatorics. Her work includes integral closure, primary decomposition, asymptotic properties of powers of ideals, tight closure and characteristic-ppp methods, homological algebra, and connections between algebra and graph theory.